Last year I did a Perspectives article & a POMOCON post about the Biden Administration’s disavowal of the Trump State Department’s report on unalienable rights. I pointed out then that Secretary Blinken had scoffed at the report when asked about it during his confirmation hearings. Since then, President Biden & Secretary Blinken have only doubled down on their relativism when it comes to rights. At his speech at the Dodd Center for Human Rights, Biden said with his bizarre delivery:
We have fewer democracies in the world today than we did 15 years ago. Fewer. Not more—fewer. Cannot be sustained…
Leading by example means not pretending that our history has been perfect, but demonstrating how strong nations speak honestly about the past & uphold the truth & strive to improve.
We make the best case for gender equality, racial justice & equity, religious freedom, the rights of the LGBTQ+ peoples & other marginalized communities around the world by practicing what we preach…
We’re unique in all the world. We’re based on one guiding principle: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men & women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”
We have never lived up to it. We’ve never, until very recently, walked away from it. The arc has always bent closer & closer to justice & inclusion. The moment we stop, the moment we rest is the moment that our influence diminishes.
On Biden’s view of things, History is what tells us what rights to uphold; we don’t follow the duties from God or what reason can discern about a permanent human nature.
In the WSJ today, Thomas Farr points out something Blinken said last year I had not heard, from a press conference in March 2021:
The State Department disavowed the work of its Commission on Unalienable Rights, a panel then-Secretary Mike Pompeo assembled in July 2019 “to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.” When the commission published its report a year later, its central contention was that certain rights—including religious freedom—are given by God to every person & may not be removed by gov’t. The report recommended this powerful & humane idea be strengthened in American diplomacy.
Two months into office Secretary of State Blinken renounced the framework: “There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.” The implication is that gov’t’s can manufacture rights they favor & simply deem them universal. Look how that’s worked out in China, Iran, or Russia.
The State Department has parroted that conception of rights since. It has declared that the right to abortion & “the rights of the LGBTQI communities” are “at the heart of our foreign policy.” Countries that fail to recognize them risk losing U.S. support—an arrogant attempt at cultural dominance.
The statement referred to by Blinken is absurd on its face. There is “no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others?” So, the right to life is just as important as the liberties of of LGBTQI, or the right to private property, for example? What an asinine way of thinking, that could be easily corrected by appreciating that the right to life is UNALIENABLE, while other rights are not.
In Blinken's way of looking at things, the right that trumps is the one that has POWER on its side, since reason cannot establish any priority. Property rights being on the same level as liberty rights, with the power of the Supreme Court on one side, is exactly how one gets Dred Scott v. Sanford.
Very grateful for this work. Truth does not depend on who is in power. May God bless America and may He help us now in this hour of desperate need.
Coherent political philosophy and the Biden White House?
Rights?
Unalienable?
Hahahahahaha ad infinitum. Today we learned this: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privately-demanded