by Stefano Gennarini JD, C-Fam
World leaders known to be vocal supporters of abortion and gender ideology held back and stayed quiet in their speeches at the General Assembly last week. Is this part of what abortion radicals are calling the “anti-rights push back?”
“It is unacceptable that with all the atrocities in the world, the UN’s top human rights officials spend their time criticizing the United States for protecting our children from transgender mutilation and transgender insanity and enforcing our immigration laws,” President Trump told world leaders in his official speech.
President Trump was not alone. A growing chorus of world leaders criticized gender ideology and UN activism on controversial social policies during the high-level debate of the General Assembly last week.
The President of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was critical of international efforts to promote gender ideology and said it was a threat against the traditional family. “Global gender neutralization policies have turned into a siege targeting children and the institution of the family. We can only break the siege by protecting the family as consisting of a woman and man.”
President of Peru, Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi, also complained that interference by international mechanisms into domestic politics was a threat to democracy. “Peru, as other Latin American countries, has seen agendas imposed upon us that have divided us as a society, politics have been instrumentalized, democracy has been eroded, and the institution of the family has been weakened,” she said, calling the family a “crucial” institution for the people of Peru.
“We believe in the family as an irreplaceable pillar of our society. We believe in respecting tradition. We believe in equality before the law and human dignity,” she said at the conclusion of her speech. She also urged international institutions to respect national sovereignty. “The world does not require identical democracies. It requires legitimate democracies. It does not demand nations that are all the same. It does not need cookie cutter nations. It needs truly free peoples.”