Are We Serious About Human Rights?

We agreed with most other nations that jobs and housing and medical care are basic human rights. 
But as a country we don't implement them. 
I've heard Republicans argue that in fact, they ARE not human rights at all. 
I‘ve even heard right-wing commentators say that health care for all Americans is communism. 

The U.S. signed an agreement with other UN nations, defining and agreeing on what issues are basic human rights. 

One of the basic human rights the U.S. agreed to was housing. 
We lead the first world in the number of homeless citizens. 
To my knowledge, there is no serious plan being discussed to house these people. 

Obama's plan is education, concentrating on science, math, and technology. 
That could work in twenty years, leaving, among others, lots of women and children without homes or incomes for quite a few years. 

The Republican plan is to slash spending to the poor and provide more tax breaks for the rich. 
This will, they say, create a "trickle down" effect. 
The increased wealth will sort of slop over the wheelbarrows, or the banks of the money river, and wind up in the hands of the undeserving poor. 

The one effective talking point that I have heard from Muslims is the way we treat our poor in America. 

They say, "You have millions of poor people living on the street. 
You lead the world in the number of your own citizens you put in prisons. 
Millions of Americans have no jobs. 

We should be like you?" 

At some point we may have to acknowledge the things we do to our own people, and move forward to make progress on the issues affecting them. 

I believe it would make us more effective as advocates for human rights, if we practiced them here, on our own disadvantaged citizens.


The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is one of the first international documents to be based on the idea that rights are guaranteed to each human being. Most previous international declarations and treaties were based on the idea of positivism, whereby rights are only recognized once they have been set forth in national legislation. Like the UN itself, the UDHR was written with the aim of establishing world peace by promoting human rights. Originally, the UDHR brought together 58 distinct geographic, cultural and political backgrounds in the formation of one universal document. Although the UDHR is not legally binding it has created international human rights standards that are codified in various international treaties.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted between January 1947 and December 1948. Its text was composed by the then eight-member Commission on Human Rights headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, and sought to include the whole spectrum of human rights: from cultural, social and economic to civil and political rights. Following over 1,400 votes modifying the document's text, the UN General Assembly unanimously passed the Declaration on December 10, 1948, with eight abstentions to the vote, coming from Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia.

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION
OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Article 25

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.