The Family Makes a House a Home
By Rebecca L. Riggs
July/August 2001 Family Voice

Last February, the team from Concerned Women for America (CWA) prayerfully departed for Nairobi. Our destination: the U.N. preparatory committee meeting for Istanbul+5, a conference to evaluate the progress of nations in providing shelter for their citizens. This followed up the Habitat Conference (which CWA also attended) held in Istanbul, Turkey, five years ago.

At that time, radical feminists tried to use the U.N. document on shelter as a vehicle to many other ends, such as changing the meaning of gender, promoting population control, encouraging redistribution, and marxist-like control of cities and communities. CWA’s lobbying in Istanbul was justly rewarded with a document that didn’t advocate these ideas. We attended this year’s conference to protect the review document from these radical agendas and to use it to strengthen policies that benefit families.

Our first opposition came in negotiations about HIV/AIDS, which has become an international emergency particularly in Africa. Tragically, Africans have been convinced that condoms protect from HIV. CWA wrote and distributed a publication exposing this falsehood and lobbied for language that would encourage abstinence education, rather than sex education that promotes promiscuity. We discussed abstinence programs and materials with many delegates and debated condoms with others.

A great success for CWA and other pro-family organizations in Istanbul in 1996 was a paragraph on the family in the final document. With this, CWA again called for pro-family policies. But when the United States proposed a phrase on the family, Sweden, speaking for the European Union, lambasted it.

Still, most of the delegates agreed with us. A young African told me, “The young people move to the city to earn money for their families. But they are cut off from their traditions, and they follow bad examples.” The CWA team spoke about the breakdown of the family in the United States. We encouraged the delegates to support pro-family policy at the United Nations and within their own governments.

After a week of battles, the final document of the Istanbul+5 Preparatory Committee included three strong paragraphs for the family. This success will be useful to CWA in future U.N. projects and will influence family policies worldwide.

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