The Feminist Agenda Is Rolling Right Along
by Phyllis Schlafly	October 3, 1996

Did you think that those United Nations Conferences held in Cairo, Beijing and Istanbul were just consciousness-raising sessions where the feminists in the Clinton Administration could commiserate with females from 189 countries about how badly women are treated by the male patriarchal society? Well, think again. When we give the feminists a tax-paid junket to cultivate their grievances, you can bet they will use that opportunity to cook up a lot of mischief.

Did you think that, in our constitutional government, "all legislative powers" are vested in the Congress, where laws, to be valid, must be passed by a majority in both Houses? Well, think again. The feminists have devised a sneaky way to bypass the constitutional process, achieve what they want by "consensus" at a UN conference, and then use the federal bureaucracy to implement their policies as though they were law.

In May of this year, the Clinton Administration set up the President's Interagency Council on Women chaired by those two longtime friends and co-conspirators in feminist activism, Hillary Rodham Clinton and HHS Secretary Donna Shalala. Its mission is to "follow up on U.S. commitments made at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, September 4-15, 1995."

On September 28, the President's Interagency Council will hold a national conference via satellite to report on the "progress" made toward Beijing's "Platform for Action."

Soon after the feminists returned from China a year ago, UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who was the U.S. Delegation chair in Beijing, spelled out the goals in a document called "Bring Beijing Home." These included "family responsibilities must be shared" (obviously, the government should force husbands to do the dishes and the diapers) and, of course, assuring abortion rights.

Albright announced that Beijing had produced "an international women's movement of activists, advocates and advisors to the nations of the world." U.S. taxpayers paid one-third of the $14 million bill for the gab session.

The Beijing commitments are now being implemented through a federal entity composed of high-level representatives from 30 federal agencies. It holds monthly meetings, engages in outreach activities, conducts local seminars, and uses a White House address.

One major activity of this President's Interagency Council is to agitate for the longtime feminist goal called "comparable worth." This is a plan to set up a federal wage-control apparatus to subjectively decide which wages are "comparable," and then, in the name of "equity," raise the wages of jobs held mostly by females and freeze the wages of jobs held mostly by men.

This "comparable worth" notion has been rejected by all U.S. legislatures and courts that have considered it, but the feminists continue to pursue it. The Interagency Council's mission statement reveals that the feminists are trying to enforce it through their pals in the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance, using new reporting requirements and "corrective remedies."

Another "top priority" of this group is ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Only radical feminists could believe the silliness that the lot of American women would be improved by allowing a UN agency to define our rights.

Domestic violence is another major item on the Beijing agenda. This will allow the feminists to assure that the $1.6 billion voted by Congress for the Violence Against Women Act is treated as feminist pork and channelled to their friends.

The National Education Association has produced a video on the Beijing Conference called "Cornerstone for the Future" featuring (surprise, surprise) Hillary Rodham Clinton. Designed to promote discussions in middle schools about women as victims who need more government services, the video was launched by Mrs. Clinton at a middle school in Fairfax County, Virginia.

The behind-the-scenes activist who has been coordinating this agenda is Bella Abzug, the former Congresswoman who is now head of the Women's Environment and Development Organization, which (as expected) is a recipient of U.S. taxpayer grants. At Feminist Expo '96, organized by former National Organization for Women head Eleanor Smeal and held in Washington, D.C. in February, Abzug boasted: "You made a contract with the world's women, and that has to be enforced. And how does it get enforced? By politics, by political action."

Abzug is an experienced activist. In addition to her 12-point "Contract with American Women" that includes demands for comparable worth and affirmative action, she boasts that work is under way to promote her platform in high schools, colleges and universities through courses and seminars on Beijing's notion of "gender equity."

If she runs out of U.S. taxpayer grants, she can call on the United Nations Development Fund for Women, whose literature announces that it is working with governments to transform Beijing's 362 paragraphs into "national strategic plans and programs." Stay tuned, because this year's UN conference in Istanbul, called Habitat II, wants to add the "right to housing" to the UN's Global Plan of Action.