European Parliament dismisses Estrela-Report: A Resounding Defeat for the Abortion and Homosexual Lobbies
Posted on | December 10, 2013
By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.
Prior to the vote that took place this morning two groups of MEPs had tabled two different alternative motions. The first, which went into much detail to rebut the absurd and preposterous claims about “human rights” in Mrs. Estrela’s draft report, was rejected, but a second one, which briefly and clearly states that the EU has no competence to impose on its Member States any of the measures called for by Mrs. Estrela, was adopted by 334 against 327 votes, with 35 abstentions. This meant that it was not anymore necessary to vote on Mrs. Estrela’s controversial draft, as it had been implicitly rejected through the adoption of the alternative motion. . . .
And the official press release by the EPP (European People’s Party) group drily states the following:
“Plenary Session Press release – Women’s rights/Equal opportunities − 10-12-2013 – 14:39This may sound unspectacular, but I think that this outcome is even better than a simple and unqualified rejection of the Estrela draft. It makes a clear statement regarding the limits of the EU’s competence, and forestalls future attempts to use the European Parliament as a platform for the promotion of controversial agendas that, dressed up with thick layers of pompous “human rights” rhetoric, actually have to do neither with the EU nor with human rights. This sets an important precedent that will have to be taken into account at future occasions, for example when the similarly controversial “Lunacek-Report on LGBT Rights” will have to be voted in one of the European Parliament’s next sessions.
Parliament on Tuesday passed a non-binding resolution on sexual and reproductive health and rights tabled by the EPP and ECR groups which states that: “The formulation and implementation of policies on sexual and reproductive health and rights and on sex education in schools is a competence of the member states.” The resolution was adopted by 334 votes to 327, with 35 abstentions.
A non-binding resolution tabled by the Women’s Rights Committee fell. This resolution was controversial. It was originally tabled in October but referred back to the committee for further discussion. The committee then made some adjustments, without altering the substance of text, and re-tabled it for a vote at the December plenary session. However, this text was lost when the EPP-ECR resolution was adopted.”
It is true that the rejection of the Estrela-Report will not change the law of the land in any EU Member State, just as its adoption wouldn’t have done. Nonetheless, today’s vote is a great victory for the pro-life cause, for the respect of human rights (in their true and authentic sense), and for democracy. It might be that years from now we will remember this day as a turn of the tide. It might be that this victory is of similar importance as the cannonade of Valmy, of which Goethe wrote: “this is history in the making, and you can say you’ve been there”.
Why is it so important?
Firstly, because for twenty years or more the abortionist and LGBT-lobbies could use the EU and the UN to advance their respective agendas without being observed. The EU institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg, and the UN bureaucracies in New York and Geneva, are very remote from the lives of ordinary citizens, and therefore receive very little attention from the mass media. At the same time, these bureaucracies have been very accessible to certain lobby groups, provided that those groups shared and supported the UN and EU bureaucrats’ own political agenda, which consisted in promoting abortion and “gay rights”.
The EU and UN pretended to be listening to “civil society”, but in fact they only held a dialogue with a fake “civil society” that they had themselves created for that purpose. Real citizens had no access to this secluded world, nor did they get much information of what was going on there. This lead to a situation where, for several decades, the abortionist and homosexualist lobbies, in close co-operation with like-minded UN and EU staff, were able to fabricate what they aptly described as “rights by stealth”: they were re-writing human rights, and nobody seemed to notice it, or to oppose them.
The outcome of the Estrela vote shows that this strategy is no longer likely to be successful. There was a massive mobilisation of real citizens who have become aware of what is going on and who have written to their MEPs, asking them to vote against the Estrela draft. The defeat of the Estrela report evidences the emergence of a genuine civil society – one that consists of real citizens, not of slick lobby groups.
And this leads to my second point: what was decisive for today’s vote was that the opponents of the Estrela draft had a much greater capability of mobilizing real citizens than the supporters. There was a multiplicity of on-line petitions, each signed by thousands of individual citizens with their names and addresses. There was a Facebook-site that received more than 4000 likes in less than 3 days. There were more than 200 citizens demonstrating outside the Parliament building. There was a massive amount of letters that citizens sent to MEPs – allegedly hundreds of thousands. MEP Rachida Dati from France, on her blog, wrote of a “rain of e-mails pouring into our inboxes, behind each of which there is a concerned or angry citizen who must be listened to”.
Indeed, they must. Politicians in the EU begin to realize that the pro-life cause is socially relevant. This was already evidenced by the 1,9 million signatures collected by the citizens’ initiative “One of Us” – the most successful European citizen’s initiative so far.
By contrast, who provided support to the Estrela draft? Only the usual suspects, i.e. a number of self-serving lobby groups with no substantial backing from real citizens. Among them one finds the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International – two organizations providing abortions and contraception services at a commercial scale, and who heavily rely on government funding. No wonder that they supported the Estrela draft, which for them included the promise of future EU funding. But which citizens do they represent (except the paid photo models that figure on their glossy brochures)?
Another example is the European Humanist Federation (EHF) with its various branches such as the UK-based “National Secularist Society”: these groups absurdly claim that the opposition to the Estrela Report were “ultra-conservative” and “religious extremists”, who “represented only a tiny proportion of EU citizens”. But whom do they themselves represent? The number of citizens who, each one by himself, wrote letters to MEPs to protest against the Estrela draft very likely by far outsizes the total membership of EHF and all its affiliates! If this is a “tiny proportion of EU citizens”, how would EHF describe itself? They are not exactly mainstream, are they?
Another staunch supporter of Mrs. Estrela’s controversial approach to sexual rights is ILGA-Europe, a wannabe “non-governmental organization” that receives 70% of its budget directly from the European Commission, and the rest from three private donors (the most important among them being George Soros). This is no wonder, given that ILGA held its own stake in the Estrela Report, which called for compulsory sexual education that should, on the one hand, be “non-judgmental” while, on the other hand, “convey a positive image of homosexuals” ( – a perfect paradox, it seems, but at the same time a clear attempt of depriving parents of their rights to educate their children according to their own moral convictions). Again, one is tempted to wonder: does this group have any significant membership that it can claim to represent? If not, should the European Commission not be asked to stop funding ILGA-Europe?
The most egregious example of fake “civil society” is perhaps “Catholics for a Free Choice” (CFC), a group that clearly is neither Catholic (in fact, it is virulently anti-Catholic!) nor “for a free choice” (given its opposition to the freedom of conscience of healthcare providers), and which has already long ago been found out to be “not a membership organization” but, as one observer aptly described it, to consist of “not more than one man and one fax machine”. Frankly, if I were asked to build a coalition to promote “abortion as a human right”, I would probably not want CFC to be part of it: they are just too obviously lacking credibility.
And finally, you have Amnesty International, about whom I wrote a blog entry just a few days ago. Amnesty still lives on the credibility it accumulated decades ago, when its focus was set on saving the lives of political prisoners of conscience. But this capital of credibility is now being rapidly depleted: the fact that Mrs. Estrela was able to cite Amnesty as one of her supporters, that was no convincing argument to sway the Parliament in favour of her draft report, but further tarnished Amnesty’s already damaged reputation.
The defeat of the Estrela Report can therefore be seen as a big victory of real citizens over a fake “civil society” – a small coalition of lobby groups that, as it now appears, represent nothing but their own particular vested interests. And it appears that these real citizens, encouraged by today’s victory, will continue making their voices heard on other occasions. The day may be near when Europe’s political elite and mass media will begin to understand that civil society wants neither abortion nor same-sex marriage. The feminism and sexual revolution of the 1960s looks increasingly outdated – parties that support this agenda will lose elections they otherwise might win. What citizens really support is the culture of life, not the culture of death the Estrela report stands for. The upcoming European elections in May 2014 are a good occasion to bring this message home.
And this leads me to my third point: today’s victory will be an encouragement for all who contributed to it. At the beginning, it seemed hardly worthwhile, and indeed impossible, to prevent the Estrela-Report from being adopted. And yet it was achieved. In fact I think what provided the strongest motivation for citizens to fight against this report was the arrogance and recklessness with which it was promoted.
It started with the fact that the representative of Planned Parenthood, Vicky Claeys, loudly bragged about her role in having drafted the motion. It continued with the profoundly anti-democratic methods with which socialist, communist, green, and liberal, politicians sought to force the Report through the Parliament – preventing a debate in the plenary assembly, seeking to prevent a vote on the proposal to refer the draft back to Committee, excluding the possibility of tabling new amendments after the report had been referred back, and so forth.
This has angered not only many citizens, but also some parliamentarians – and it might be that this was the decisive factor that finally tilted the outcome of the vote. One MEP today, immediately after the vote, described Mrs. Estrela as “a democrat of convenience – respectful of democracy only as long as she is winning”. This description is very apt– but he might well have extended it to many other supporters of the defeated report, in particular Mr. Mikael Gustafsson, the chairman of the Parliament’s Committee for Gender Equality, whose eagerness to get the report adopted as quickly as possible led him to handle the procedure somewhat carelessly.
Nothing is more motivating than success. Today’s triumph of human rights and democracy makes appetite for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment