Author: Brian Carnell

Back in January, Wendy McElroy gave an excellent speech at a conference about the European Union that was later published on the web, Equality vs. Freedom. McElroy does an excellent job of laying out the case for favoring freedom over equality in general, and highlights an excellent example of feminist hypocrisy on freedom.

Toward the end of the article she writes about debating Kathleen Barry about prostitution. McElroy believes that any sex between consenting adults — including sex for money — should be allowed, whereas Barry is well known as an outspoken opponent of prostitution (as McElroy notes, Barry was asked to write the part of the United Nation’s Code of Human Rights that deals with women).

Anyway, at their debate both Barry and McElroy argued that prostitution should be decriminalized. McElroy writes that by decriminalization she means that laws against prostitution should be eliminated. Barry had a similarly though twisted version of decriminalization. McElroy writes,

Barry meant that no laws should be applied to women involved in prostitution. Only the men should be arrested and punished. In other words, when a man and a woman commit the same act, the same crime, only the man would be legally liable.

This is very different from having one law that is applied unequally to men and women. The law being proposed would specifically and pointedly create two categories of people and two categories of punishment for the same offense: women who are exempt, men who are guilty. For committing the same act. This is a hideous development.

And, of course, a development that is all too common among contemporary feminists.

Source:

Equality vs. Freedom. Wendy McElroy, The Mises Institute, January 22, 2001.

The United Nations recently has decided to take on the international arms trade which it believes helps fuel international conflicts in places like Africa. In July it plans to host a conference on the world’s small arms trade. The only problem being that the disarmament program the UN touts as its most successful the most turns out to have been a disaster.

In April the National Post obtained a copy of an internal evaluation of the UN Development Program’s disarmament project in West Africa. Although the project spent more than $9 million, the internal evaluation reported that, “very few results that could be described as tangible have been identified as a result of [the project’s] activities.”

According to the Post, the report mentioned several “financial irregularities,” including the project’s director, Ivor Richard Fung, using project vehicles for personal use. Fung, for his part, rejected the report until he was removed from his position after the report was circulated.

Beyond the problems with any given United Nations program, the bigger problem here is the UN’s bizarre method of dealing with warfare. Namely it seems to think that it can seriously stem the supply of weapons into places like West Africa without the parties in those areas first resolving their difference. This is, of course, absurd.

International efforts to stop the diamond trade in West Africa have been an utter failure, as will attempts to solve the region’s problems by stemming the flow of weapons. The United Nations seems to have cause and effect reversed. It is not the case that there is war in West AFrica and elsewhere because there are weapons, but rather that there is a large demand for weapons precisely because there are ongoing armed conflicts.

Source:

UN’s African gun control program firing blanks; Canadian-backed project has ‘very few results that could be described as tangible. Steven Edwards, National Post, April 14, 2001.

AntiWar.Com has an excellent piece by Alexander Cockburn comparing the media treatment that former Sen. Bob Kerrey received after he finally went public with his story about killing civilians in Vietnam, to the media coverage received by Tom Blanton, who was finally convicted for the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing.

No one is talking about the “ambiguities of that bitter and divided time,” or the “fog” of the fight over segregation in the South. No one is saying that Blanton was just a compliant foot soldier in a struggle for which the commanding officers in Dixie — Strom Thurmond and the others — bear responsibility.

Yet listen to the forgiving words from liberals for Bob Kerrey, yesterday a US Senator and today the President of the New School in New York. Bob Scheer, Los Angeles Times columnist, liberal Democrat, writes that Kerrey is “a good man”, and that our anger should be reserved for Robert McNamara, Pentagon chief in the JFK-LBJ years.

And, of course, he quotes Christopher Hitchens on Fox News going on about how he likes Kerrey “very much” (apparently if Henry Kissinger kills innocent women and children he’s a war criminal, but if you current boss at the New School admits to such transgressions, it was just another day in a bad war).

Cockburn notes that if the United States were being consistent, it would call for a special United Nations expeditionary force to seize Kerrey (and perhaps bomb Washington, DC, into submission if the government interfered with such efforts).

Especially since, as in Kosovo and in the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing, the government seems to have played a major role in helping domestic criminals cover up their acts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation long had surveillance recordings demonstrating Blanton’s culpability but never divulged that fact, just as a number of people had to look the other way for decades for Kerrey’s actions to have gone uninvestigated and unpunished.

Maybe it’s time for sanctions and other measures to force the United States to comply with international human rights laws.

Source:

Kerrey, Blanton and the Liberals. Alexander Cockburn, AntiWar.Com, May 4, 2001.