Earth Charter Invasion
By Joseph Klein
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 30, 2006
As I reported in FrontPage Magazine last February, the ACLU decided to challenge the decision of a duly elected local board of education in Pennsylvania to end a United Nations-sponsored International Baccalaureate Program in its public schools that is closely linked to the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter is a New Age spiritual declaration of nature-worshipping principles for living in harmony with the sacred Earth. Its prime sponsors – former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, one of Kofi Annan’s most trusted advisors and architect of the Kyoto Protocol – have compared the Earth Charter to the Ten Commandments. The International Baccalaureate Program is run by the International Baccalaureate Organization, which has specifically endorsed the Earth Charter.
Thanks to litigation subsequently instituted by the ACLU and dissident parents against the local board of education in Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, and settled recently, the UN’s Earth Charter may soon return to their curriculum. Faced with mounting legal bills and exposure to personal liability, the members of the board felt they had no choice but to give in to the plaintiffs’ demands and restore the program with an offer of state help to defray its costs.
Once again, we witness the well-funded ACLU ramming its political agenda through the courts. This case is a model of what we can expect to see all across the country as the Earth Charter is given a carte blanche to invade our schools. The ACLU has fought tooth and nail to keep the real Ten Commandments and any other Judeo-Christian symbols out of the public schools and all other public spaces. Yet it had no hesitation in going to court to challenge a duly elected local board of education and force the resumption of a curriculum that included a New Age religious component. Unfortunately, the few courts asked to address the issue of whether teaching New Age type spiritual programs to children with public funding is permissible under the First Amendment establishment clause have ducked for cover.
Nobody seriously doubts the benefits of a well-rounded, multi-disciplinary global education that stresses critical thinking. The International Baccalaureate Program has much to offer students in this regard. However, the program’s connection with the Earth Charter is disturbing. Its advocates always try to shut off debate by telling us how the Earth Charter teaches such positive non-controversial values as peace, mutual respect for each other, and caring for our natural environment. Anyone objecting to the Earth Charter, they say, is intolerant, anti-peace, and anti-environment. I was attacked personally on the liberal Daily Kos website as a "wingnut" for daring to question their self-styled new Ten Commandments for better living. I am all for peace, respect for our fellow beings and a clean planet, just like the authors of the Earth Charter. Those values animate Judeo-Christian teachings as well. But the Earth Charter is being deceptively marketed as a set of universally accepted ethical principles. In actuality, it contains a seductive message endorsing nature-centered worship, global government and an anti-capitalist agenda that its boosters shamelessly want to use to indoctrinate our school children. It is too bad that those who decide to incorporate the Earth Charter in their teaching, without any counter-balance, do not apply the International Baccalaureate Program’s purported critical analysis to themselves.
The following ‘principles’ in italics are quoted directly from the “EARTH CHARTER Adaptation for younger children," which appears on the website of the Philadelphia Earth Charter Citizens. I have added my bit of commentary after each one to exemplify the core lesson that the principle is intended to impart to our kids, although the quotes do speak for themselves:
http://www.earthchartercitizens.org/
“The Earth Charter must be law for all countries and all peoples.”
Core lesson for our kids: Don’t trust your own country’s democratically enacted laws and policies if they are in conflict with the global law drafted by unaccountable, unelected ‘citizens of the world’.
“Those who have the most must be the ones who help the most.”
Core lesson for our kids: Don’t rely on people do the right thing on their own volition and decide to contribute to charity or do volunteer work. You must take from those whom the world government considers ‘rich’ and give to those whom they define as ‘worthy’.
“You must only desire to have what you need.”
Core lesson for our kids: You have no right to keep what you earn and enjoy the fruits of your labor as you see fit. Global Big Brother knows better what you should want.
As the kids get older the message stays the same, only with bigger words. The following appears in the EARTH CHARTER Adaptation for young people, which also can be found on the website of the Philadelphia Earth Charter Citizens:
“Wealth must be fairly distributed, both within your nation and around the world”.
“International corporations and economic organisations must act clearly for the good of everybody.”
“The Earth Charter, a new universal law, must be accepted and, subsequently, respected and put into practice by all countries and peoples of the world.”
Notice the use of the word “must” in every sentence. These are not drafted as aspirational principles. They are written as commands. Who gets to decide what fair distribution really means and how it should be implemented? Who determines what actions are and are not “for the good of everybody”? No doubt, the United Nations would love to play the leading role as the arbiter of the “new universal law” that we all must obey.
The Earth Charter crowd is even trying to de-Americanize our own unique history of freedom. Believe it or not, for example, high school students in Tampa Florida have formed an Earth Charter Club with the mission of updating the Declaration of Independence to include not only women and people of color but also animals, plants and the Earth itself! The Earth Scouts, a coed youth organization for 3 - 17 year olds developed by Earth Charter Communities USA, refers to the Earth Charter as the “Declaration of Interdependence.”
It is time that we wake up to the invasion of the UN Earth Charter in our public schools and challenge the ACLU in court at its own game. If the Judeo-Christian values that have formed the foundation of our country’s history cannot be taught in the public schools, there is certainly no place in our schools for their inverse.
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