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When an acquaintance approached BYU law professor Richard G. Wilkins in April 1996 and asked him to attend a United Nations conference in Istanbul, she told him that proposed conference language "might undermine the family, promote same-sex marriage, and further entrench abortion as the final solution to most of the world's troubles," Wilkins recalls.
The professor, however, was unsure just how dangerous the proposed language could be and of the practical impact U.N. policies had on local governments. Together with research assistant Bradley Roylance, Wilkins studied the issue. The results of the research were ominous.
"U.N. conference documents, although not technically binding upon participating nations, nevertheless are an important influence in shaping and solidifying the normative concepts of international law," wrote Wilkins and Roylance in a paper on the subject. The researchers also found that such documents may have an impact on the domestic policy of nations that sign the documents, even without formal enforcement mechanisms. "Great care, therefore, is warranted in crafting the precise language incorporated into a formal conference declaration."
Indeed, says Wilkins, "The Clinton administration has established a White House task force to implement U.N. gender-discrimination pronouncements that Congress has refused to ratify, and the Supreme Court has invoked U.N. declarations to define the contours of the Constitution."
But the three-week Istanbul conference was scheduled during the final weeks of a local production of Fiddler on the Roof, starring Wilkins as Tevye opposite his wife Melany as Golde--25 years after the couple played the same parts on a Salt Lake City high school stage.
"I didn't want to go," says Wilkins, a father of four who was already disappointed by setbacks in local family-values battles. "I thought it was useless." He was further disturbed to read the original draft of the Habitat Agenda being hammered out in Istanbul: "In different cultural, political, and social systems, various forms of the family exist." Combined with a statement that all forms of the family are "entitled to receive comprehensive protection and support," it was clear that legal protection was being extended to same-sex marriages. In addition, statements advocating abortion had been inserted into the document.
What was a former assistant U.S. solicitor general under Rex Lee to do? Though he had appeared more than once before the U.S. Supreme Court, Wilkins was far more comfortable in Dickens' or Shakespeare's plays than on the stage of international politics. Yet, he says, something kept telling him to go. So, still sporting the beard he had grown for his role as Tevye, Wilkins packed his bags and flew to Istanbul.
"I was hardly optimistic," Wilkins reports. "I thought that, at most, by delivering a paper I might inspire some decision-maker to exercise caution before further undermining traditional social values." He expected to give his paper and then return from the June 1996 conference to write a paper decrying the forces of social deterioration, which he had now found crashing through the U.N.
Wilkins did present his paper on the impact of language in U.N. conference documents, and his thoughts were well received, causing considerable discussion. Then he began helping Susan Roylance--the acquaintance who had spurred his involvement--and her organization, United Families International, draft and distribute proposed amendments to the Habitat Agenda. The amendments emphasized that families are essential components of any stable community and that traditional marriages and families should be fostered.
During the course of the conference, an LDS elders quorum president from Nairobi, Kenya, happened by the United Families booth. Johnson N. Mwaura was a member of an important conference committee and encouraged the organization to nominate someone to speak for families. Minutes before the deadline, a nomination was made, and Wilkins soon found himself on a list of 10 speakers slated to address the U.N. delegates drafting the Habitat Agenda. The opposition was intense as anti-family organizations tried to occupy all available slots and time. The presentation was rapidly tilting away from families when an Algerian delegate protested that there was no variety in the voices being heard. The motion was quickly seconded, and Wilkins was called to the podium to deliver a speech he had written using one text--the LDS Church First Presidency's proclamation on the family.
"The traditional family is the necessary foundation for (international) communities," said Wilkins, "because it is the sanctuary where women and men learn cooperation, sacrifice, love, and mutual support; it is the training ground where children learn the public virtues of responsibility, work, fair play, and social interdependence. International law and the family, therefore, are inextricably linked. Disregarding this link places both the law and families in peril."
The speech fell on June 10, closing night for Fiddler on the Roof back in Provo. Having abdicated his role as Tevye, Wilkins was nonetheless calling for tradition. And people were listening.
Two days after the speech, the Arab delegations at the conference issued a statement saying they would not sign the Habitat Agenda if it failed to recognize religious heritage, the family as a basic unit of society, and marriage as a union between a man and woman. A day later, the G-77 nations (139 African, Asian, and Pacific Rim countries and China) made a similar statement. Both groups also said they would refuse to sign an agreement that obligated nations to provide abortion services.
By the time the conference adjourned and the Habitat Agenda had been ratified, it was a pro-family document with a paragraph defining marriage as being between a husband and wife who are equal partners. It was a staggering turnaround, which Wilkins freely attributes to spiritual influences and which has led to a mobilization of the BYU community toward active participation in the arena of international policy.
"Richard's coup in Istanbul was being a law professor from the United States who actually was in support of the traditional family," says Cory Leonard, director of student programs at BYU's David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. "People were dumbfounded. Developing countries, Islamic countries, Latin American countries all approached him and asked how to move forward." After the conference, Leonard and the Kennedy Center joined Wilkins and the J. Reuben Clark Law School in building an Internet site about families to respond to interest from developing nations.
It soon became evident that Wilkins, Leonard, and others would be needed at subsequent U.N. conferences, where attempts would be made to subvert the advances made in the Habitat Agenda. In fact, at the Nairobi conference this spring, a resolution surfaced that urged limiting the influence of patriarchal religious organizations in developing countries. Because the resolution was an obvious threat to the mission of the LDS Church, Wilkins' carefully tracked its progress. He stayed in the room where it would be brought to the floor until 2 a.m. on consecutive nights because he knew if he left, it would be introduced. It was never formally introduced.
"Based on the proclamation on the family, this is a very appropriate endeavor for a Church-sponsored organization to be involved in," says Leonard, who traveled with Wilkins to Nairobi with BYU students Mike Lee, Bill Perry, and Carrie Taylor. They arrived under the flag of Family Voice, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) organized by the law school and Kennedy Center to be an international pro-family information and lobbying group.
Worldwide, NGOs are attempting to rewrite international law. "We have grown accustomed to federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C., imposing their will upon local decision makers," Wilkins says. "Unless the current direction of the U.N. is altered, we will also become accustomed to international lawmakers having the same impact. The world is quickly approaching the point where policy set in Istanbul will play in Peoria."
It would be folly to think Wilkins and NGO Family Voice alone could reform a bureaucracy the size of the United Nations. But Leonard says Wilkins is well-suited for the situation he's fallen into. "Richard is Type A compulsive. An overachiever. The folklore is that he had the highest-ever GPA in BYU law school history. He was a BYU journalism undergrad, so he is an excellent writer. Richard is a fairly dramatic person. His attention to detail is impressive. He doesn't miss a dotted i. He's a very sincere person, a very decent human being. He's exactly the kind of person I would hope would represent BYU at something like this."
Wilkins attended another conference in July, this one in Geneva, Switzerland. Following the conference, he and law school dean H. Reese Hansen were scheduled to go to Romania at the behest of the Romanian president, but had to postpone it until later in the summer. "The president said, 'Come and tell me about this,'" says BYU academic vice president Alan L. Wilkins. "'I have two goals; one, to get people back to work and two, to promote and develop the traditional family.' As someone who has a strong commitment to blessing the Church, who can stand up and deliver a speech, who is an accomplished researcher with political insight and the skill to craft language for drafting policy, my impression is that Richard is quite uniquely suited for this. To hear him tell the schedule they keep at these conferences, they don't get a lot of sleep. He's mostly working on adrenalin and spiritual strength."
Regarding his successes, Wilkins says, "If anyone would have told me that an important international conference would reaffirm the family, reject homosexual unions, and retreat significantly from former worldwide commitments to abortion, I would have called that person either an unexperienced optimist or a fool. That person, however, would have been neither. He simply would have been a person who knew that 'with God all things are possible.'"
