January 16, 2012 (theCatholicThing.org) - The 10 p.m. negotiating session was set to go all night long. This was the last night of a two-week process that had been in planning for years before. All the hard things would be decided in the dead of that final night, when everyone was exhausted, the cafeteria was closed, and the translators had all gone home.
I walked out onto the floor of the immense negotiating room in the basement of the United Nations. Concentric half rings of desks cascaded from the front to the back with one hundred and eighty-something national “flags” arranged alphabetically, and floor-to-ceiling windows 100 feet high overlooking the moonlit East River.
On the negotiating floor, I approached a Muslim ambassador and said, “This session is going all night long and its going to be very tough going. And when it gets really hard, I want you to know that right over there,” and I pointed to a section of raised seats off to the side, “twenty Christians will be praying for you.”
That night this man was a tiger in defense of unborn children. The gathered western governments, along with U. N. bureaucrats, hungered for a right to abortion that would require nations to allow for the unrestricted killing of their unborn babies.
He rose time and time again to stop dangerous language from entering into that document. He pounded on his desk. At one point, he even rose in defense of our Christian NGOs who had come under attack from the European Union. As the sun rose, his efforts, our efforts, paid off. An alleged right to abortion was stopped once more.
And here's how they justify folks who might be persecuting Christians at home:
We in the U.N. pro-life movement believe we are called to this fight in particular. We applaud those who work on other legitimate human rights issues like religious persecution. But we believe the right to life comes first. It is the right that makes all other rights and freedoms possible including freedom of religion.
We also believe that in our own way we do fight for religious freedom. In working with Muslim diplomats, in becoming friends with them, even by loving them, we believe we are changing hearts and minds. And in our own – perhaps mysterious – way, we do help our beleaguered brothers and sisters. This commonly misunderstood way is the way of Christ.
I reproduce this here for no other reason than I think its a fairly compelling piece of prose, though of course I disagree with many of the sentiments expressed in it.
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