Like all other human organizations, the United States has a less than pure record on human rights. The same U.S. founding documents that set some souls soaring with language of universal rights also enslaved other human beings and defined them as property, while also excluding the female majority of the population entirely. We the people have spent the last 232 years working to live up to the best and undo the worst of those founding documents.
Whatever one thinks of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin or Hillary
Clinton, the 2008 presidential election campaign was a historic move to
open up our political life and leadership to all. Eleanor Roosevelt was
no starry-eyed idealist. As a woman, an advocate for the poor and the
wife of a man with a disability, she knew that U.S. rhetoric on human
rights often did not match reality. Lest she forget it, the Soviet and
other Communist delegates to the United Nations continually reminded
her. As she recounted it, they would point out some failure of human
rights in the United States and ask, "'Is that what you consider
democracy, Mrs. Roosevelt?' And I am sorry to say that quite often I
have to say, 'No, that isn't what I consider democracy." [...]
