WASHINGTON — Prominent human rights organizations, presidential candidates, Democratic senators and religious leaders are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights.
A trio of letters sent Tuesday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and obtained by NBC News, accuse the State Department of sidelining rights of women and the LGBTQ community in favor of religious liberty.
Pompeo launched the commission earlier this month, saying it would “provide fresh thinking” about returning the government’s focus to promoting “natural law and natural rights.” Human rights groups fear that’s code for ending or limiting U.S. advocacy abroad for marginalized groups.
One letter being sent Tuesday by more than 180 rights groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Disability Rights and the Anti-Defamation League — demands that the commission be abolished. The groups say the commission is being overseen by clergy and scholars “known for extreme positions opposing LGBTQI and reproductive rights," including some who they say have defended “indefensible human rights violations.”
“We urge you to immediately disband this body,” the groups write. Instead, they implore Pompeo to “focus your personal attention on the significant challenges currently facing the protection of human rights globally.”
At the same time, 22 U.S. senators — almost half of the Democrats in the upper chamber — are pushing back on the suggestion “that there is any ‘confusion’ over what human rights are.” In their letter to Pompeo on Tuesday, the Democrats call that “simply an Orwellian twist to defend the indefensible.”
“Instead of condemning gross human rights violators, President Trump has fawned over Kim Jong Un, embraced Vladimir Putin, praised Rodrigo Duterte, looked the other way as Xi Jinping imprisons millions, and covered up for Mohammed bin Salman,” the senators write in a letter voicing “deep concern” about the commission and its leadership.
The letter organized by New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was also signed by several Democrats who are running for president in 2020, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo.
The State Department had no specific comment on the new letters, but pointed to remarks Pompeo made recently in a Washington Examiner interview in which he said that people in the United States take rights for granted "and then we start throwing around rights language about things that are rights of ours."
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