Pompeo Report Criticizes Human Rights Gains
Year-long State Department effort yields a 60-pager saying, in essence, “let’s do less”
BY MATT TRACY
One year after the State
Department unveiled
a new panel aimed at
reassessing the role
of human rights in American foreign
policy, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo published the work of that
group in the form of a 60-page report
that questions modern-day
approaches to human rights and
refuses to acknowledge LGBTQ
rights.
Pompeo foreshadowed the report
last year when he argued that
there was a need “to step back and
refl ect seriously on where we are,
where we’ve been, and whether
we’re headed in the right direction…
What does it mean to say or
claim that something is, in fact, a
human right?”
To that end, Pompeo assembled
a commission featuring individuals
who have cozied up to the religious
right. Among those included
were University of South Carolina
Professor Christopher Tollefsen,
who has been hostile to women’s
reproductive rights and labeled
gender transition as “unreasonable,”
as well as Mary Ann Glendon,
President George W. Bush’s
ambassador to the Vatican, who
has said same-sex marriage is a
“tragic” and a “radical social experiment”
that serves to “impair”
children’s rights.
ABC News fi rst reported last
year that Princeton Professor Robert
P. George, a past chair of the
homophobic National Organization
for Marriage, had a “prominent
role” in creating the commission.
The commission’s ultimate goal,
Pompeo said last year, was to align
the nation’s approach to human
rights with the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR).
But the report produced as part of
that effort suspiciously resembled
an attempt to sow confusion about
the public’s understanding of human
rights in the modern era.
Now the nation’s top diplomat,
whose rumored 2024 presidential
ambitions have been fueled in part
by his secret visits to Republican
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team, tasked with re-evaluating the nation’s approach to human
rights, claimed that broadening the scope of human rights initiatives has “left the most disadvantaged
more vulnerable.”
donors and political fi gures within
the last year, is following through
on his pledge to reframe human
rights at a time of heightened attention
on racism, as well as an
intersectional focus on related homophobia,
transphobia, and sexism,
during a summer of protests
across the nation that coincides
with an ongoing trail of murders
targeting Black transgender women.
The report was also unveiled just
weeks after the Supreme Court established
sexual orientation and
gender identity workplace discrimination
protections under the defi -
nition of sex in Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act.
Rather than zeroing in on the
rights of marginalized groups,
however, the report focused on
asserting that property rights
and religious rights are “foremost
among the unalienable rights” and
further suggests there is an ongoing
erosion of both of those rights,
saying that “a political society that
destroys the possibility of either
loses its legitimacy.”
The commission’s criticism of
overly broad defi nitions of fundamental
REUTERS/ TOM BRENNER
human rights included
praise for the framers of the UDHR
for keeping the list of nine core international
human rights treaties
“more tightly circumscribed” so
that it “would accord higher political
importance to each of the rights
and would reduce the confl icts
among rights claims, confl icts that
could dilute the realization of any
particular rights and of rights in
general.”
The report went on to list different
United Nations agencies,
organizations, treaties, and declarations
codifying human rights in
such a way that appeared to suggest
that there are far too many
rights initiatives in existence.
“There is good reason to worry
that the prodigious expansion of
human rights has weakened rather
than strengthened the claims
of human rights and left the most
disadvantaged more vulnerable,”
the report stated. “More rights
do not always yield more justice.
Transforming every worthy political
preference into a claim of human
rights inevitably dilutes the
authority of human rights. Accordingly,
the United States should be
HUMAN RIGHTS
open but cautious in its willingness
to endorse new claims of human
rights.”
In his public remarks about the
report, Pompeo sounded as out
of touch as ever, skipping past
somtimes vague language in the
commission’s written report and
directly attacking The New York
Times’ “1619 Project” as all but
fake news.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project
— so named for the year that
the fi rst slaves were transported to
America — wants you to believe our
country was founded for human
bondage,” Pompeo said in moving
beyond his role as America’s chief
international diplomat and diving
headfi rst into a freighted domestic
political debate. “They want you to
believe America’s institutions continue
to refl ect the country’s acceptance
of slavery at our founding.
They want you to believe Marxist
ideology that America is only the
oppressors and the oppressed. The
Chinese Communist Party must
be gleeful when they see The New
York Times spout their ideology.”
Pompeo, clearly not bothered
enough by the founding fathers’
slaveholding ways, then assailed
those targeting statues of such
historic fi gures.
“The rioters pulling down statues
thus see nothing wrong with
desecrating monuments to those
who fought for unalienable rights
— from our founding to the present
day,” Pompeo said. “This is a dark
vision of America’s birth. I reject
it. It’s a disturbed reading of our
history. It’s a slander on our great
people.”
According to CNN, the report
will undergo a two-week commenting
period, after which a fi nal version
would be unveiled.
Pompeo’s anti-LGBTQ work
dates back to his days in Congress,
where he slammed the Supreme
Court’s marriage ruling in 2015
as an “abuse of power” and once
railed against letting queer folks
serve in the military, saying, “We
cannot use the military to promote
social idea that do not refl ect the
values of our nation.”
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