By Jack Lessenberry
What if Congress tried to cut off all Social Security benefits to anyone who spoke out against some policy of the U.S. government?
Naturally, you’d be horrified and angry – but not too worried, since even the members of the current U.S. Supreme Court would be outraged, and declare that unconstitutional in about five minutes. We do, thank Madison, have freedom of speech.
Unfortunately, some of the fanatics on Capitol Hill are working hard to deny that most American freedom to others. Meet U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a right-to-life bigot who is my candidate for the most un-American member of Congress. Smith is the ringleader of a group of far-right radicals who last year held the government’s foreign policy hostage until they managed to pass something called the "global gag rule," which has to do with international family planning.
Here’s how it works. The United States spends a little – far too little – money promoting family planning in developing countries. Many have severe population problems; one doesn’t have to be a sociology professor to see that an abjectly poor 18-year-old girl with three children doesn’t need any more kids.
But – and here’s the really important part – we do not offer them abortions. By law, the United States can use no foreign aid funds to pay for abortions. Nor do we lobby anyone on behalf of abortion. What the U.S. Agency for International Development – AID – does do is promote education and birth control.
That’s not good enough for Grand Inquisitor Smith, who, before he entered Congress, was elected executive director of New Jersey Right to Life while working in his previous high-powered job as a salesman for his dad’s sporting goods store. Smith insists on preventing any private charity or "NGO" (nongovernmental organization) that gets U.S. family planning funds from using its own money – not ours – to debate abortion policy.
That’s right. AID now has to deny family planning funds to any NGO engaging "in ... effort(s) to alter the laws or government policies of any foreign country concerning the circumstances under which abortion is permitted," or forbidden. Consequently, we now have to keep a blacklist of organizations unwilling to surrender their freedom of speech to Washington, something that no doubt helps promote anti-Americanism. And though it may never have occurred to tennis-ball brain Smith, this probably has helped produce more abortions, too.
Nothing, after all, reduces abortions (not to mention infanticide) like safe and effective family planning. There are now 800,000 fewer abortions a year in Russia, for example, thanks to the rise of contraception since the fall of communism.
Most members of Congress are neither as stupid nor as fanatic as Smith. So how did this thing get through? Simple. Too many of the relatively good guys are cowards, afraid of being targeted by Right to Life. What Smith did was block payment of our United Nations dues so long that we actually risked losing our vote in the General Assembly until, finally, Congress gave in on the gag rule. All this infuriates Judith DeSarno, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, a private, nonprofit group. "This doesn’t only violate free speech, it violates our nation’s foreign policy," DeSarno said over dinner in Dearborn last week. "We’ve always tried to encourage open debate and broad citizen participation," in other countries, she noted. She was here to lobby citizens and lawmakers on behalf of two bills that would end this nonsense:
• The Global Democracy Promotion Act (HR 4211) would nullify the gag rule in the best and simplest way. It would prevent Congress from restricting foreign organizations’ freedom of speech in any way not imposed on U.S. groups.
• The Saving Women’s Lives Through International Family Planning Act (HR 3634/S.2380) gets rid of the gag rule, and also bumps international family planning funding up to $541 million; the GOP-held Congress has slashed it $372 million.
Even most sporting goods salesmen have more than enough intelligence to figure things out. Similarly, even the least sensitive Republican ought to know that increasing overcrowding in desperately poor nations is not apt to be beneficial in the long run, even to him and whatever insider trading pool he identifies with the U.S. of A.
Yet I suspect that unless you, dear reader, make your sentiments known to your elected representatives pronto, nothing good will happen. Congressmen who especially need to be yelled at are Democrats David Bonior and Dale Kildee, Catholics who have been all over the map on this, casting contradictory votes several times.
And this is an issue on which Al Gore ought to jump, both because it is morally right, and because an informed public ought to see common sense, and that there is a difference between parties, and it does matter who controls Congress.
But does he have the guts? Nobody other than zealots are comfortable these days with any type of "abortion" issue. Most of us are a bundle of contradictions on this: Last weekend, a Los Angeles Times poll found a majority of Americans think abortion is murder – and two-thirds think a woman should have the right to choose.
Yet being a leader means sometimes having to lead. The best lack all conviction, the poet Billy B. Yeats wrote once. The worst are filled with passionate intensity. Time for someone to help prove WB, and me, dead wrong.