John O'Neill at a candidates' night.

Just got an email from former candidate for State Rep. John O’Neill concerning Illinois Senators wanting to pretend they are U.S. Senators. It concerns the Senator’s wanting Illinois agencies to comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Below, the McHenry Grade School Board member, due to be re-elected today without opposition (that is, the same number of people are running for school board as there are number of vacancies), explains his position:

I am writing to urge SR92 not be passed.

Twenty years ago, in the early 1990s I had heard this UN Treaty being discussed on the radio and was in utter disbelief of what the broadcaster was discussing. I thought that perhaps the statements were being exaggerated at best or misrepresented at worst so I contacted the UN in New York and asked for a copy of the document to be mailed to me (this was before the internet had become so widely used), Upon receipt of the document, I read it and was outraged that any governmental or quasi-governmental entity would attempt to force doctrines upon parents which absolutely run counter to our society.

A few notable intrusions into how parents in a free society choose to raise our children are, as follows;

• Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion.
• The best interest of the child principle would give the government the ability to override every decision made by every parent if a government worker disagreed with the parent’s decision.
• A child’s “right to be heard” would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed.
• According to existing interpretation, it would be illegal for a nation to spend more on national defense than it does on children’s welfare.
• Children would acquire a legally enforceable right to leisure.
• Christian schools that refuse to teach “alternative worldviews” and teach that Christianity is the only true religion “fly in the face of article 29” of the treaty.
• Allowing parents to opt their children out of sex education has been held to be out of compliance with the CRC.
• Children would have the right to reproductive health information and services, including abortions, without parental knowledge or consent.
• Parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children.
• A murderer aged 17 years and 11 months and 29 days at the time of his crime could no longer be sentenced to life in prison.

Please, before voting for this horrible UN Treaty based on a benign sounding name or what you may have heard about it in the media or from your own legislative leaders, download and read the treaty text for yourself available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/pdf/crc.pdf and decide if giving up the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit should be supplanted and the state or the UN should enforce its own ideas of how a child should be raised.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a terrible document which, if adopted in our state or nation would seriously strip away parental rights.

Rather than focusing on taking away the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fir, I would love it if the Illinois State General Assembly would work on repairing the economy and bringing back jobs to our great state.

Thank you,
John O’Neill

O’Neill even supplies the email addresses of the Senators, compliments of State Senator Dan Duffy’s web site:

The Executive Committee which is voting on this United Nations Treaty tomorrow is comprised of the following members, please call them and let them know that you do not want this treaty to be approved by the committee.