Just over a year ago, the American Secretary of State Michael Pompeo convened a commission

on human rights, tellingly called in the commission's official title, Unalienable Rights.

I say tellingly because that phrase, unalienable Rights. I say tellingly, because that phrase, unalienable

rights, is obviously a reference to that famous sentence in the second paragraph of the American

Declaration of Independence, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created

equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain

unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, by referring to the commission that way, Secretary Pompeo is signaling that his pursuit

of human rights, as a matter of American foreign policy, should be rooted in the deepest

sources of American political history.

Why?

Does it mean that by so rooting the conception of human rights in the American tradition that

the State Department doesn't recognize any others?

What of the role of multilateral institutions in defining the rights shared by citizens in other nations.

The Commission answers these and many more questions in the report that it delivered to the Secretary and to the public earlier this month.

The report argues that religious liberty is among the foremost of human or unalienable rights,

and that nations, not multilateral institutions,

are necessary to secure human rights. Now, those two core assertions, alongside the perception

that the Commission has neglected rights related to sexuality and gender, have, in this

political environment, invited real controversy. Because we are especially interested

in religious freedom and because human rights have so often been used as a weapon against Israel,

I thought it would be interesting to read the report and have a conversation about it.

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