On the news of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's landmark speech yesterday about gay rights as human rights, a viewer reminds us of an early address she gave. "Beautiful!" @APitty writes, "And it mirrors her comments from Beijing the 1995 UN Conference on Women."
And indeed, Ms. Clinton's 1995 speech, given when she was the First Lady, is amazing. I don't know whether to find it sad or inspiring, in that so much of its argument remains timely:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed -- and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights once and for all.