by James Glaser
March 7, 2005

The United States of America is the world's Super Power and that means people have to listen when Washington speaks, but that does not mean that they have to like what they hear.

There is a huge conference going on right now at the United Nations about improving women's lives. The conference opened with the first order of business being to come up with a statement reaffirming the statement used to close the last Women's Conference held in Beijing.

The New York Times reports that, "The Beijing negotiators tried to anticipate controversy by recognizing unsafe abortions as a serious public health issue while leaving the question of legality to each nation."

America's delegation announced that the United States would not join this universally accepted statement unless the document was changed and would say that it did not create "any new international human rights" or "include the right to abortion."

Now this opening statement was not a binding statement to start with and it could not create any new rights at all, but here we have the "Land of the Free" trying to make sure that there were no new rights given to anyone while those same rights are given to Americans by our Supreme Court.

American Women have the right to seek an abortion, while the United States is trying to tell the rest of the world that their women should not have that right. The world looks at this as being akin to America and George Bush, telling the rest of the world they can not develop nuclear weapons, but America is free to build a whole new class of them.

George Bush and his administration has made it clear to the world that if they even try to develop nuclear weapons, we feel that we have the right to destroy the very fabric of their civilization and we did that very thing in Iraq to prove the point.

The Times points out that the Beijing platform says, "that abortion should be safe where it is legal, and that criminal action should not be taken against any woman who has an abortion."

Thursday evening it was reported that the American delegation has agreed to drop the explicit anti-abortion clause from its proposed amendment, and Friday it withdrew the whole thing.

So, for almost a week, Washington started this total controversy about abortion, telling the rest of the world that in essence it is perfectly OK for American women to have abortion on demand, but that we were against "foreign" women from having that same right. On top of that, Washington was not even steadfast enough to hold its position on moral grounds and in the end said "OK," you can have the same rights as we do.

This is just another example of America saying, "do as I say, not as I do."

George Bush and all of Washington have to go back and figure out what Diplomacy really is and how best to use it. It never will work, telling other nations what they must do. America has to lead by example and you have to know that George Bush, you, and I all came off as total racists, who do not even have the conviction of our moral beliefs.

I do not believe that America has any right to dictate to the world the laws we think they should have behind their own borders and I find that it is total hypocrisy for us to tell other countries to have different laws than what we have.

The fact is that every American woman has the legal right to have an abortion if she feels that is the right thing for her to do. It does not matter if I believe that is right or if George Bush feels that is right, because the United States Supreme Court says it is right. We are a Nation of laws and we respect those laws, but as American citizens we have the right to try and change them. We have set up our country so that when a man like George Bush is voted in as President, he does not have the right to change the laws he does not like. American Presidents are not dictators. However, the Bush administration has been acting like they are the "dictator" for the whole world and freedom loving people all around this globe will fight that to the death.

We have over three more years with Bush as President and I have to wonder just how much more he will alienate the United States from the rest of the world?