Another American Outrage - Have They Abandoned Decency?

What do the United States, Russia and China have in common? Several things and they're almost always bloody awful for mankind and human civilization.

The latest concerns a resolution coming up today before the UN Security Council aimed at combatting the use of rape as a weapon of war. How could any country stand against that? Well, where there's a will there's a way.

The German mission hopes the resolution will be adopted at a special UN security council session on Tuesday on sexual violence in conflict. 

But the draft resolution has already been stripped of one of its most important elements, the establishment of a formal mechanism to monitor and report atrocities, because of opposition from the US, Russia and China, which opposed creating a new monitoring body.

Even after the formal monitoring mechanism was stripped from the resolution, the US was still threatening to veto the watered-down version, because it includes language on victims’ support from family planning clinics. In recent months, the Trump administration has taken a hard line, refusing to agree to any UN documents that refer to sexual or reproductive health, on grounds that such language implies support for abortions. It has also opposed the use of the word “gender”, seeing it as a cover for liberal promotion of transgender rights.

...“If we let the Americans do this and take out this language, it will be watered down for a long time,” a European diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said. “It is, at its heart, an attack on the progressive normative framework established over the past 25 years.” 

“Until the Trump administration, we could always count on the Americans to help us defend it. Now the Americans have switched camp,” the diplomat said. “Now it’s an unholy alliance of the US, the Russians, the Holy See, the Saudis and the Bahrainis, chipping away at the progress that has been made.”

Know who'll be cheering on America today? Kinsella's newfound buddy, Andrew Scheer, and his far right, oh so white, religious nutjobs. This American effort to thwart the resolution is right up their back alley.

As for the United States, it's moments like this that make me remind myself that more voters chose the deeply flawed Clinton over Trump in 2016. That same populace, however, chose to leave the Senate in his enablers' hands in 2018 even as they delivered the House to the Democrats. We'll know, or at least I will, whether to continue this 'benefit of the doubt' business in November, 2020, when we see if the American voting public give Trump a second term. If they do it will be much harder to carry that notional distinction.