GENEVA -- Blasting anti-family policymaking on a national and international level, an LDS general authority joined a Jewish rabbi, a Czech policymaker and a French parliamentarian Tuesday in calling on family advocates everywhere to fight for the traditional family.
Elder Bruce Hafen, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' First Quorum of the Seventy, told about 1,500 delegates to the World Congress of Families that "for too many years, family policymaking, both in the U.N. and worldwide, has emphasized dysfunctional and alternative family types, leaving the typical natural family to wither as an endangered species."He took particular aim at what he called "self-appointed lobbyists" who he said have replaced the U.N. policy agenda with their personal agenda, "like a rebellious child seizing control of the steering wheel of the family car while at full freeway speed."
While he noted the value of the United Nations and its declarations earlier this century regarding the value of family and children, "today's U.N. (has) lost the plot about family life," he said. As an example, he used the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which put forth " 'a new concept of separate rights for children with the government accepting the responsibility for protecting the child from the power of parents.'
"Hello! Did anyone notice that this 'new concept' uproots one of the most fundamental natural rights about family life -- that parents may rear their children as the parents see fit -- so long as the parents are fit."
He said such a resolution "shows how political activists who have lost their arguments in such democratic forums as parliaments and courtrooms have learned to use the United Nations to exploit the naivete of local governments."
"If activists can clothe their extremist visions of personal relationships -- note how that word differs from the word 'family' -- in the vague but lofty language of an international human rights treaty, they've built a Trojan horse that lets them slip like an undetected virus into a country's legal system and, eventually, into its culture," Elder Hafen said.
Because many new democracies don't have legal precedents on which to base new legislation, they often turn to U.N. policy to craft their own legal base. U.S. appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court also at times use U.N. policy in creating legal precedent.
Such a reality is not lost on advocates of anti-family legislation, said Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a nationally syndicated radio host and president of Toward Tradition, an American movement to encourage Jews and Christians who support family values.
"It is an error to underestimate the enemies of the traditional family. They oppose it not because they do not 'get it,' but precisely because they do.
"There are really only two ways to structure human society," he said.
One is grounded in the religious origins of traditional family, which views humans as progressing toward a future time when God will renew all things. The other views "people as animals" who answer life's basic questions -- who are we, what are we doing here, and where are we going -- in vastly different ways.
The first looks to God and the future, while the second looks to government and ultimate concern for the present, he said.
The second group is composed of "well-intentioned people who seek the good of the world -- perhaps in an abstract sort of way -- but in the absence of any biblical blueprint whatsoever, slide in the direction of belief that human society is too important to be left to amateurs like mothers and fathers and families."
Michaela Freiova, director of the Family and Society program for the Civic Institute of the Czech Republic, called on those who would tamper with traditional family relationships to understand that the former Soviet Union also did so -- by making the state supreme at the expense of the family.
Under communism, children were forcibly put into state day care while their mothers were forced to work and take on male roles and professions. She said the feminist movement -- which advocates state-sponsored child care and enshrines career over motherhood -- is "a paradox.
"How can our experience, which has cost us so dearly, be debased" by anti-family advocates? Freiova asked.
"This unified effort to be molded by social engineering ideas rather than historical and cultural traditions is a fact. . . . These ideas, pushed under the banner of liberating loyalty, for us represent gloomy memories of the past," she said. "I hold a firm hope that you will receive our message not only as a warning but above all as a sign of hope" for the future.
French parliamentarian Christina Bonita decried her nation's recent legal recognition of same-sex unions. The new law extends the same legal benefits and protections to such unions as it does to traditional marriage.
"I ask you above all not to copy France in this. . . . Don't be afraid. This marvelous congress is the point of departure at the world level for (protecting) the family which we love. We are not men and women who have lost our way. Quite to the contrary, we are men and women who look toward the future, and we base our actions on the child, who will ensure the everlasting duration of life."
Brigham Young University and the LDS Church's Relief Society are among the conference's sponsoring organizations. It concludes Wednesday.