WOMEN'S ISSUES AND CHINA

Most Americans are doubtless paying precious little attention to a conference to be held next month in China. However, those who have marched off into the fever swamps of radical left-feminist ideology are working themselves into quite a lather about the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The conference, to be held in Beijing Sept. 4-15, promises an absolute festival of radicalism on what the national media calls "women's issues."

The first indication that things have swerved well out of the mainstream is the identity of the head of the American delegation: former New York congresswoman Bella Abzug. From her college days as a pro-Stalinist to her years in Congress, Abzug has always been a museum piece of strident, leftist extremism. It is most revealing that the Clinton administration would choose her to lead the American delegation.

Without exception, Abzug has steered the American delegation into far-left positions on every issue. A seven-page letter on the conference from Dr. James Dobson, a Southeast Missourian columnist who writes "Focus on the Family," documents in depressing detail the anti-family, anti-religion, pro-abortion agenda to be pursued. The conference is being held in a country that enforces a forced-abortions, one-child-per-family policy of population control that includes infanticide for females. Now those are women's rights issues worthy of a fight. Instead, our delegation is debating the absolutely freakish fine points, stuff such as whether there are not two, but, in fact five genders: male heterosexual, female heterosexual, male and female homosexual and bisexual. And media worthies wonder why mainstream American women no longer identify themselves as feminists, or why 76 percent of Americans, in a recent poll, don't trust their own government.

The majority in Congress should plan some well-publicized hearings on how we ever reached this sinkhole in the waste of taxpayer funds to promote an agenda opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans.