President Donald Trump has broken a lot of brains since he won the 2016 election despite the predictions of the so-called elites. The most recent example of Trump Derangement Syndrome shows left-wing advocacy groups and Democrats actually condemning a commission set up to discuss “unalienable rights” — rights that apply to each and every one of us.
More than 400 advocacy groups and elected officials signed a letter Tuesday outlining their concerns about the Commission on Unalienable Rights that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier this month. Their concerns fall in line with the narrative that Trump and his administration is anti-LGBT and anti-women. Consistently ignored by these same people is the fact that Trump is the first U.S. president to ever enter office supporting same-sex marriage. Also ignored is the fact that women make up a majority of the pro-life movement and that there is more to women’s rights than just abortion.
As expected, signers of the letter include Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, and numerous former Obama administration officials. The letter claims “the Commission’s chair and members are overwhelmingly clergy or scholars known for extreme positions opposing LGBTQI and reproductive rights, and some have taken public stances in support of indefensible human rights violations.”
These “extreme positions” include being pro-life (polls consistently show very few Americans stand with these groups in supporting abortion throughout an entire pregnancy) and against same-sex marriage. Millions of religious Americans still disapprove of same-sex marriage.
The letter provides out-of-context quotes from specific members of the commission to justify their claims.
Beyond all the complaints is the fact that the commission hasn’t even met yet, so these groups can’t even say for certain what will be discussed. It is also a public commission, meaning the public will be able to watch most of their meetings and submit information and questions.
All of this ignores the simple fact that the commission was set up to look into unalienable rights, which apply to every human being. It is a discussion Pompeo has been interested in since he was at West Point. During a recent interview with Raymond Arroyo, Pompeo explained what the commission would do. As one example, Pompeo noted how many countries sit on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council that discriminate against different identity groups.
“The UN Human Rights Council had sitting on it countries that you know treat women poorly, treat people different because of their faith or because of their race or because of their sexual orientation, things that we know governments ought not do,” Pompeo said. “And so we want to bring it back. The attempt is to reground that so that the United States Department of State at very least is back to first principles on what these human rights are, and clean up that language.”
In a separate interview with radio host Larry O’Connor, Pompeo said we seem to take human rights for granted in the U.S. and that this commission will help diplomats express concern with human rights violations in other countries when traveling abroad.
“One of its aims is to go back to the grounding, how our founding fathers thought about this, so that when we’re abroad talking about this, sharing with other countries why their behavior doesn’t conform to these understandings about how every human being should be treated, that we can talk about it with clarity and with authority,” Pompeo said.
Further, the commission is mainly focused on religious liberty around the world, as Pompeo told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“We’re very focused on our mission. The fact that some on the left have become sort of crazed by the fact that we’re trying to define, trying to create this religious freedom around the world, or define the central rights for every American, I find confusing, befuddling, and perhaps suggestive that they know they have the wrong end of the stick, and we are going to ground America in our constitutional understandings in ways that some – they and their colleagues wish wouldn’t happen,” Pompeo said.