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Listen to the 10 min audio
Read the transcript:
WHY DOESN’T THE U.S. WANT TO BE PART OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL?
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, today, I want to deal with human rights, touching upon what is going on in the U.N. and also touching upon the abortion issue. Let’s go first to the story that broke last week. The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council with U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley calling the 47-member council a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.”
DR. REEDER: I applaud this. And then the question will come out that, yeah, but in our analysis of the Singapore Agreement, we did make a critique that President Trump should have put front and center the human rights issue and now you applaud us pulling out of the Human Rights Council in the U.N.?
The reason we put it front and center for Singapore is it needs to be front and center and the reason why I would applaud this tactic is the Human Rights Council has done very little, if anything, concerning human rights. It has done a lot to use itself as an instrument and bring the United Nations as a player concerning critique of the only Democratic nation in the Middle East and that’s Israel.
COUNCIL IS A REBRANDED FALSE POLITICAL TOOL
Secondly, the council is not only made up of some of the worst violators of human rights, but it has in the leadership the worst violators of human rights such as Russia and China and their embrace of North Korea. The Trump administration has warned, “If you do not make changes, then we are going to withdraw.” Ambassador Haley and her team have brought numerous remedial proposals to recalibrate the Human Rights Council. Not only have they been rejected but, actually, the council has plunged further into its political leverage game as opposed to dealing with human rights.
This Human Rights Council is a morphing of the previous organization — the Human Rights Commission of the U.N. was disbanded because of its political maneuvering. It was disbanded and then reformulated as the Human Rights Council. The very same reason it had to be abandoned has now corrupted the organization again. Hopefully, if it does get restructured, it will be restructured with integrity.
TWO PEOPLE LABEL ABORTION WITH DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT TERMS
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, let me take you to two other stories that I want to combine — one is rather disheartening and the other is rather inspirational. The Daily Wire is reporting Richard Dawkins is defending eugenics abortion. He said, “It’s all about human suffering.”
Let me take you to another story where Texas Governor Greg Abbott has promised a teenager that he will grant his dying wish to outlaw abortion altogether in the state of Texas. Teen cancer patient, Jeremiah Thomas, had one wish before he died and he offered that wish to the pro-life governor of Texas. His request? Treat abortion like an act of murder.
DR. REEDER: Well, I agree with him. I’m grateful for the unselfish and insightful and convicting wish that he made to Make-A-Wish Foundation. He did get his audience with the governor and the governor affirmed and quoted the fact that 68 percent of Texans believe this barbaric act ought to be stopped and it is an act of murder and is no different than and comparable to the Holocaust policies of the Third Reich of Nazi Germany.
Tom, I applaud Pope Francis for declaring the same thing, that this is an act comparable to and actually more horrific than the practices of Nazi Germany. The response of the famed and I would say ill-famed pseudoscientist, Richard Dawkins, and his promotion of atheism — and, by the way, also inconsistency with atheism, if violence is actually how the human race came into existence in terms of species development with his atheistic evolutionary view of origins, he says that Pope Francis is nonsensical and that this is just a part of purifying the human race and reducing human suffering.
THIS IS NOTHING BUT EUGENICS
What he is saying is this: the eugenics movement is alive and well. The same eugenics movement that was propagated in the United States, that was quoted and used by Adolf Hitler and in the practices of Nazi Germany — that is embraced by Richard Dawkins that, “Actually, we’re doing these people a favor by killing them.”
He would point to Denmark and say, “What a wonderful success that, of the pregnancies that were diagnosed with children having Downs Syndrome, only four made it to birth and the rest of them were killed.” Iceland has “eradicated” Downs Syndrome and that’s a false statement. It hasn’t eradicated Downs Syndrome, but it has eradicated Downs Syndrome babies by killing them — that’s what it’s done. France, itself, is now outlawing commercials that present Downs Syndrome children in a favorable light because it might cause grief to those who decided to kill their Downs Syndrome babies.
Dawkins is a propagator and a perpetuator and a celebrator of the eugenics movement in that there are certain children that, if unwanted, inconvenient or imperfect, then we have the right to declare those lives unworthy of life. And by the way, we’re going to end your suffering. What we’re really doing is ending our suffering because we have determined them as inconvenient or as emotionally difficult if we have a child that is not “the perfect Gerber baby.”
And so here we see a human right that needs to be eradicated and that is the so-called right to kill the child in the womb. I agree with the teenager that it is a barbaric practice of murder and let’s eradicate it. I agree with Governor Abbot that the commitment to eradicate it needs to be a part of his political party’s platform, the Republican Party. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has decided that the all-out assault on the child in the womb is the best way to get votes from the cultural elite so they have taken the opposite direction and that is not only to destroy life in the womb by this “barbaric practice,” but to insist on taxpayer funding for such acts.
STANDING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Tom, to sum up from a Christian world and life view, in order to promote true human rights, it is commendable that this administration, through the leadership of Ambassador Haley, has fired the shot across the bow of the U.N. by saying we will not participate in a Human Rights Council that actually uses the language of human rights for political purposes and political enmity against certain democratic countries and promotes the biggest violators of human rights to disconnect as a matter of integrity as well as, hopefully, an influential tactic to disband this one even as its predecessor was disbanded and, hopefully, a true human rights council can be developed out of the U.N. in the future.
Secondly, we at “Today in Perspective” would utterly decry any notion that the killing of the unborn in the womb is a human right or a civil right to be protected under any constitution of any civilized country and we would applaud not only the teenager who used his dying wish to highlight this, but the governor of Texas’ response that he would commit himself to this teenager’s wish that it would be a political objective, the eradication of the barbaric practice of abortion and the destruction of life in the womb — human life — that is deemed imperfect, inconvenient or unwanted. There is no such right.
We, of course, would decry the barbaric eugenics notion that there are some lives we determine as not worth living and, therefore, the notion that abortion ends human suffering — all it does is perpetuate the notion that my convenience in life is more important than another person’s life if their life would become an inconvenience to me.
DON’T LET FALSE LANGUAGE AND LIES FOOL YOU
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, our Savior said of Satan, “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth for there is no truth in him.” Tomorrow on “Today in Perspective”, I want to look at another aspect of murder and that is the taking of one’s own life.
DR. REEDER: Now suicide outranks homicide in many of our locales. And, Tom, you’re right: Satan is a murderer from the beginning. He’s also a liar. One of the things he does is he uses the language of truth in order to promote the lie. That’s what’s happened in the Human Rights Council where they use the language of human rights in order to promote human oppression among the leadership countries. However, we have a Savior who speaks the truth truthfully and Who has given His life that we can have life and the fact that every life is sacred, made in the image of God, and everyone living can be saved if they put their trust in Christ as Lord and Savior.
Dr. Harry L. Reeder III is the Senior Pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.
This podcast was transcribed by Jessica Havin, editorial assistant for Yellowhammer News, who has transcribed some of the top podcasts in the country and whose work has been featured in a New York Times Bestseller.