From the state that brought us Ron Paul, now comes Ted Cruz, a freshly nominated Texas GOP candidate who’s not going to let the UN tell him where he can and cannot golf.
Cruz, 41, is a Princeton- and Harvard-educated former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk who just beat out a far more experienced candidate to become a Texas GOP nominee for Senate. Blessed by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, he is broadly favored to win November’s election.
Cruz hates a lot of stuff – gays, socialists, creeping Shariah – but what really gets his goat is the United Nations and its vicious plot to eliminate our Constitutionally protected Right to Bear Golf Clubs.
In January, as ThinkProgress observes, he posted on his website an insanely paranoid blog railing against Agenda 21, a nonbinding UN plan seen by rightwing paranoiacs (i.e. most of the GOP) as a sort of Trojan Horse for the new World Order. Describing Agenda 21 as a “dangerous United Nations plan” that “establishes a regime of rules that attempt to bypass Congress and the American people, handing over power over vast areas of the US economy to unelected UN bureaucrats,” he wrote:
Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. Everyone wants clean water and clean air, but Agenda 21 dehumanizes individuals by removing the very thing that has defined Americans since the beginning—our freedom.
OMG golf courses?
Yes. Because as is well known, the UN is run by socialists who want to keep your dad and his golf buddies permanently locked indoors, probably sweating on stationary bikes to produce electricity like those Brazilian inmates everyone’s talking about.
Right?
Not so much.
In the land of reality, Agenda 21 is voluntary plan for global sustainability signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 after the U.N.’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It has precisely zero power to force anyone to do anything.
That hasn’t stopped our fringy rightwing friends from totally freaking out about it. The John Birch Society is on this thing like white on rice, running a national lecture tour on the supposed dangers of the decades-old nonbinding agreement.
Arthur Goldwag at Hatewatch wrote this about his experience at a Westport, Conn., JBS lecture:
Flashing slides of Karl Marx and Alger Hiss, the accused Communist spy who helped draft the UN Charter, [the JBS spokesman] painted a lurid picture. Agenda 21 explicitly calls for “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced,” he said. Its goal, he falsely claimed, is the de-population of rural regions. Foreign bureaucrats, Shurtlef added absurdly, will mandate family size here in the United States, imposing forced abortions as they do in Communist China.
Apparently persuaded by rhetoric like that, legislators in my adopted home state of Alabama last session voted unanimously to ban any plan connected in any way to Agenda 21, a decision that may bar city governments from accepting funds to implement sustainability plans devised and approved by local citizens.
And if the likes of Ted Cruz have their way at a national level, the hundreds of U.S. cities currently eligible for funding due to their membership in the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), the UN body that coordinates grants for local sustainability efforts, will also lose their ability to apply for grants. Which seems weird, because I was pretty sure the GOP – especially socialism-fearing Tea Party types – said it was into local initiatives.
Apparently, it’s more into golf, the sport of the masses.
For more on Ted Cruz, see ThinkProgress’ helpful and self-explanatorily-titled blog, Five Things Everyone Should Know About GOP Senate Candidate Ted Cruz.
