GOP likes isolation over compassion

GOP likes isolation over compassion

I remember as a child while riding in the family car on the way to vacation spots, seeing an occasional road sign demanding the U.S. get out of the United Nations.

Even as a child, I considered this attitude backward and destructive of effective international relations. On Dec. 4, it appears the Republican Party has adopted this narrow and ignorant approach to foreign relations in their vote in the U.S. Senate to reject the U.N. Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. Their vote reveals their utter hate, cynicism and inhuman attitudes toward foreign nations and their citizens.

The U.N. convention treaty brings to the world’s handicapped people the rights and privileges of education, employment, access to justice and civil rights which we enjoy in America. It would be a small effort and little sacrifice of U.S. sovereignty for America to show to the other nations of the world its moral principles in our respect of all human life. The treaty which the Republicans rejected is a brief, 26-page document, which you can find at www2.ohchr.org.

If the U.S. cannot speak to protecting the welfare of the less fortunate and those disabled throughout the world, then America has lost its moral leadership to people in the Republican Party whose critical judgment has been frozen by the icy kiss of regressive dogma.

Jesus Christ healed the lame and the blind, but clearly the Republicans prefer to follow some primitive, regressive philosophy which believes that U.S. isolation from the world supersedes compassion.

Tom Teune

Wheaton