WASHINGTON - One way to get a fight going in Washington these days is to demand that the Senate pass the international treaty on women's rights -- or warn that the document is "toxic," "dangerous" and "stupid," in the words of a pundit we'll call Already Decided.
On top of everything else, we're supposed to worry about why the Senate hasn't ratified a treaty that 169 other countries have already inked. You can be certain that if Republicans controlled the Senate, this wouldn't have come up.
But it has -- Democrats point out that Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Somalia have joined the United States in not voting for it -- and so we have to think about it. (Well, those of us do who are paid to think and are slightly desperate for a subject that hasn't been trampled to death.)
For 23 years, women's-rights advocates have been pushing for a vote on the treaty. Until now, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who dwells in this century but pines for centuries past, blocked it.
And now, Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., D-Del. -- a k a Mr. "I'm Running For President and I Need Women Voters" -- has decided that this is a ready-made issue for him as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I hate to mention it, but the treaty has a name -- the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW.
Makes you want to jump up and shout, doesn't it?
The treaty would have little to no effect in the United States, which doesn't have an equal-rights amendment to the Constitution but does have a lot of laws saying it's not right to treat women as inferior citizens. Much of the rest of the world, however, does not have such laws. So the thinking is that if the United States ratified the treaty, it might actually have some teeth in a world where some men can kill their wives with impunity, deny them education, force them to do back-breaking jobs and obliterate their dignity.
Biden says the law would help women around the world own and inherit property, establish credit, climb out of poverty, get better health care and protect themselves against violence.
Opponents say it would turn men into puny toads, create a super-race of females, end procreation as we know it, make abortion as common as toenail-clipping, open legal prostitution as a career choice to our daughters, sanction pedophilia and wipe out traditional familial relations forever. Oh, yes, and take away U.S. sovereignty.
As with most hot topics in the nation's capital, there is excess in the debate.
The treaty is basically toothless, so barriers to women's rights would not topple overnight or even for years. Like most U.N. treaties, it probably would have little immediate effect in dozens of countries. But it would give the force of an international thumbs-up in the drive to help women who are destitute, imprisoned by culture (as women under the Taliban were) and physically abused.
Biden insists that the treaty already is having good permutations. He cites the case of a woman in Tanzania who was prevented from selling land her father gave her until she insisted that the treaty gave her the right to sell her land. In Colombia, he says, it helped women win enactment of their rights under a new constitution.
According to Biden, there would be a need to enter reservations to the treaty "where it is inconsistent with the Constitution or current federal law."
Biden and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wrote recently that failure to ratify "undermines our credibility as a leader in international human rights. . . . How can we demand, for example, that India and Pakistan work harder to stop bride-burnings and so-called honor killings of women by their families?"
Supporters say nothing in the document will perpetuate abortion. They argue the United States is the only major industrialized nation not to have ratified the treaty. They insist there is no way the United States would lose sovereignty under the treaty unless it suddenly passed a law permitting bride burnings or ordered burqas to be worn.
The State Department, under Colin Powell, already signed off on the treaty. But the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, who clearly does not care that he'll never be called a compassionate conservative, now is "reviewing" (read delaying) the treaty.
The rest of the world does not understand our quirky behavior when it comes to international pacts such as nuclear-test bans, chemical-weapons bans, global-warming curbs and women's-rights demands. They think that when we speak passionately about such issues, we mean what we say. They don't understand our "do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do" byplay.
Neither do I.
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