January 22,
2000
Column #960
A NEW CLINTON SEX SCANDAL
There's a new sex scandal at the
White House. But this time the key perpetrator is First Lady Hillary
Clinton!
As she turned a blind eye toward
her husband's sexual perversions, she now is turning a blind eye to
international sexual trafficking of two million women and children sold into
prostitution and hard core pornography across national borders each year.
These numbers are on a par with the number of Africans who were sold into
slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries according to Dr. Laura Lederer of
Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
It is an issue that has forged an
unlikely alliance of such conservatives as William Bennett and Chuck Colson
and liberal feminists Gloria Steinem and NOW President Patricia Ireland.
In a column published by ''The Wall
Street Journal,'' Bennett and Colson charged: ''Over the past few months the
Clinton Administration has lobbied for the United Nations to adopt a
protocol that would lend legitimacy to prostitution and hard core
pornography. This effort has been spearheaded by the President's Interagency
Council on Women (ICW), a group whose honorary chairman is none other than
Hillary Rodham Clinton.''
For a year, the White House's ICW
has been working to convince the U.N. Convention on Transnational Organized
Crime in Vienna that ''voluntary'' prostitution is a legitimate career
option, and should not be prosecuted. Rather, the target should be
''forced'' prostitution.
''This clearly serves the interests
of the trafficking industry,'' charges Equality Now, a group that includes
such feminists as Ireland and Steinem, founder of ''Ms. Magazine.''
They note that sexual traffickers
procure their victims in many ways. ''Some women and girls are abducted;
some are deceived by offers of legitimate work in another country; some are
sold by their own poverty-stricken parents or are themselves driven by
poverty into the lure of traffickers who profit from their desperation''
hoping to give their families a better life.
However, if they ''consent'' to
their sexual exploitation, the White House believes the pimps, pornographers
and brothel owners should not be prosecuted. This turns the legal focus from
the sexual traffickers to the mind of the victims. It is a ''virtual bar to
prosecution'' says J. Robert Flores, a former prosecutor in New York City
and in the Justice Department.
This shift would overturn the 1949
United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and
of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. It recognized that
prostitution ''is incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human
person.'' And it urged prosecution of any person who ''procures, entices or
leads away, for purposes of prostitution another person even with the
consent of that person.''
To change that definition
''effectively legalizes prostitution and effectively insulates organized
crime from prosecution for its rapidly growing transnational prostitution
and hardcore pornography `industries,' charges Michael Horowitz of the
Hudson Institute.
Southern Baptist ethics agency head
Richard Land is so disgusted by the immoral position taken by the
Administration, he says, ''I have seldom been more outraged at the behavior
of the government that represents (Americans) overseas and at home than I am
at this very moment. It is absolutely appalling that the United States of
America, under the Clinton Administration's leadership, is being put in a
position of arguing for legalized prostitution.''
Of course, that is not how the
Administration sees the issue. In fact, this is what Mrs. Clinton said in
Reykjavik, Iceland in October: '' No government and no citizen should rest
until we stop this modern form of slavery, protect its victims and prosecute
those who are responsible.''
Sadly, as is so often the case with
the Clintons, their actions to not live up to their words. If she
believed what she said, the Administration would support, rather than oppose
''The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 1999,'' which was passed
unanimously by all Democrats and Republicans on the House International
Relations Committee.
A State Department spokesman said
the U.S. opposes a protocol ''that requires criminalization of all
prostitution.'' Why? Prostitution is illegal everywhere in the U.S. except
two Nevada counties. Only in Europe is prostitution being legalized. Nations
from the third world whose girls and women are being sold into slavery,
oppose tossing out the 1949 UN position.
The decriminalization of
prostitution is sadly consistent with the Administration's ''shutting down
the prosecution of the major producers and distributors of illegal
pornography,'' says Pat Trueman, director of obscenity prosecution under
both Reagan and Bush Administrations.
Now the Internet is making
obscenity available to children, without any prosecution by Clinton's
Justice Department.
The sexual immorality of the
Clintons knows no bounds.
Copyright 2000 Michael J. McManus. |