https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-absurd-fear-of-all-things-un/2012/12/10/c8b5a50a-42e2-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html
..."What is it about the United Nations that sends the GOP into such a tizzy? That diplomats are encouraged to speak French? The United Nation’s intentions are the best, yet Republicans always assume the worst. They weep for the improbable horrors that could be but shed very few tears for the hardships in the here and now, such those suffered by the 1 billion disabled people worldwide who struggle with patchwork laws and official neglect. As comedian Jon Stewart noted, “Republicans hate the United Nations more than they like helping people in wheelchairs.”
The Republicans’ unreconstructed paranoia about an organization dedicated to global cooperation isn’t new (remember Ron Paul warning of those black helicopters?). No, now it’s just been mainstreamed in the GOP’s circulatory system, another example of the party’s increasingly delusional, and ossified, worldview.
....
The 2012 Republican Party platform, for instance, declares that the GOP “shall reject agreements whose long-range impact on the American family is ominous or unclear.” Treaties singled out include the U.N. Convention on Women’s Rights (clearly a dangerously lesbian document); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (a ploy to snatch American children away from their parents); the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (no doubt a prelude to “full-scale gun confiscation”); basically anything from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (tree-hugging); and the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities (dastardly intentions detailed above).
Then there was last July’s Law of the Sea Treaty, which would have helped the United States expand our energy resources and secure our ships’ freedom of navigation. For those reasons, business leaders and environmentalists, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and even military leaders and former Republican secretaries of state were all on board. But the U.N. bogeyman reared its blue-helmeted head, and the treaty went down to a watery grave.
Taking the crazy cake, though, is the right-wing hysteria over an obscure, nonbinding U.N. resolution known as Agenda 21 ,which suggests that communities adopt sustainable, smart-growth development plans. To Ted Cruz, the tea party’s newly elected Senate darling, Agenda 21 is the “grand scheme” of George Soros to seize American property and abolish “golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” This is, as one New Hampshire state senator noted, “real tinfoil hat material,” and the same could be said for much of the current Republican orthodoxy. In today’s GOP, the fevered fringe has gone mainstream."...(more)
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