Because UN Blue-Helmeted Abortionauts in Black Helicopters full of Public Schools and Stuff, Is Why!

I've been thinking over the rejection by most of the Republican senators in the recent vote on the UN treaty that would have basically followed the Americnans with Disabilities Act, and ensured rights for disabled persons in member states. I'm still thinking it over. The rejection is a sign of how weird and disconnected the Republican Party has become from seeing the US as a part of a global community, in some ways. In other ways, I think it reinforces my impression of the modern-day GOP as being paternalistic with respects to the inputs and needs of specific groups.  Let's take a look at what happened:

Senators from both parties went to greet Mr. Dole, leaning in to hear his wispy reply, as he sat in support of the treaty, which would require that people with disabilities have the same general rights as those without disabilities. Several members took the unusual step of voting aye while seated at their desks, out of respect for Mr. Dole, 89, a Republican who was the majority leader. 

Then, after Mr. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, rolled him off the floor, Republicans quietly voted down the treaty that the ailing Mr. Dole, recently released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, so longed to see passed. 

A majority of Republicans who voted against the treaty, which was modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act, said they feared that it would infringe on American sovereignty.

In addition to former Sen. Dole, himself a disabled veteran, were supporters of the treaty from various disabled persons rights groups, who certainly would have looked over that treaty to see whether it would have had any negative repercussions for themselves, right?  And yet, the party of individual rights and responsibilities said, clear as a bell "Nope. We know better than you."

Or maybe that's just how I'm hearing it. But let's just listen to another former Senator, Rick Santorum, who has made a point of expressing his views on a matter near and dear to his heart:

Who should make the critical health-care decisions for a child with a disability? A well-meaning, but faceless and distant United Nations bureaucrat, or a parent who has known, loved, and cared for the child since before birth?

Can I just state, upfront, that some parents actually totally suck at making decisions regarding the health of their kids? They starve them, they beat them, they cart them around to faith healers and they still have the effrontery to call the nasty, short, brutal experience their children have from them, "parental love".   Who should make the decisions? I don't know--a bunch of reasonable people consulting with other reasonable people as their informed peers?

However, the United States passing this treaty would do nothing to force any foreign government to change their laws or to spend resources on the disabled. That is for those governments to decide. 

The United States—under the Americans with Disabilities Act—is the world’s leader in ensuring that disabled people, whether our citizens or foreign visitors, are able to be productive members of our society. There are no limits to what disabled persons can accomplish, in large part because of our legal protections for the disabled.

Wait--so the treaty would undermine US sovereignty, but wouldn't do anything to effect other countries' practices?  How can that be? And isn't the treaty based on our own ADA? So wouldn't we basically have no change, and it's the other guys who'd have to put up?

Oh, I don't know. I think it's telling, though, that Santorum brings his daughter into it. See, the "best interests" of the child being a matter of parental responsibility begins at birth--

For Santorum, and most of the GOP, prior to birth, a parent, namely the maternal parent, has no sovereignty over her own body. When Santorum hears "for the good of the child"-is it possible he's hearing that as "death panels for disabled babies"--since he doesn't discriminate between the rights of the born and unborn? (Or if anything, prejudices in favor of the rights of the unborn, since at least they are afforded as much in the way of health care, nutrition, etc, as their mother's body can provide. I do not see him giving the state any obligation to those effects.) I think he does, and his WND column makes it clearer than his Daily Beast peroration.

Seriously? He thinks that the best anyone will come up with is death panels--and yet disabled person's rights groups are out there clamoring for death panels to be enacted upon themselves? Seriously? He thinks Bob Dole is in fovor of death panels? That John McCain is in favor of death panels?(No, darlings, I know they aren't.) That serious people who work with disabled people are legitimately saying, "Maybe what we do is abandon these disabled people..." Who are sentient beings we love and stuff, right?

If he can't tell this is bullshit, and many of his fellow GOP members don't know that's bullshit, that is a gaping hole in the mentality of that party. It's an assumption that the rest of the world is just made up of weird monsters with no respect for the rights of the individual to chose their own treatment and acceptable standard of living. And what's especially hypocritical, is that if someone wants to insist that it's local governments (your states' rights) that are to be held to account for upholding the rights of a basic standard of care and dignity for the disabled, we should be well apprised that state governments fall short. 

So what do we find in this vote? Ultimately, paranoia that the UN will take control of America by declaring us all disabled and incompetent, and probably impose public educations and abortions on us all.  Because they are all liberals except for the ones that aren't...and, um. Right.

In other words--nonsense.