The majority of magazines sitting on coffee tables or taking space on shelves deal with the normal gossip.

Celebrity scandals, the best ways to keep off the holiday weight, recipes for the best Christmas dinners or stories about growing up are featured on many magazine covers. One magazine story that caught my eye, though, was not about the normal chitchat; it was about the United Nations and its international law.

Customary international laws are laws that are to be followed by all U.N. nations. Supposedly, the laws are from general consensus and are already accepted. After becoming customary international law, they apply to all nations, even if no treaty was ever signed and no consensus was made on the part of some nations.

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So, in layman’s terms, it means any customary international law ratified by the U.N. applies to all U.S. citizens, even if the U.S. does not agree with the law. So far, it sounds just like our system of government; all of Congress never agrees on a particular law.

We base all of our laws on one document: the U.S. Constitution. This is not the basis of international law. So, if several countries gang up to make something a law that violates our Constitution, will we still have to abide by it? Yes.

Another form of international law is treaties. These must be signed by individual countries in order for them to take affect there.

One treaty that was signed by the Clinton Administration was the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, or CRC. This was signed back in 1995. The treaty includes the extension of basic human rights to children.

This initially sounds great. Children need to have voices of their own. In America, they cannot vote and often cannot make their own opinions known to Congress.

Therefore, having these “basic general human rights” applied to them seems reasonable. It seems reasonable until you begin to examine the rights in detail and realize what the intentions of them are.

Some of those rights outlined by the Convention on the Rights of the Child are the right to freedom from degrading treatment; right to freedom of opinion and of expression; right to adequate standard of living; right to health and health services; and right to education. They sound like great goals. But as we take them apart, we can see their flaws.

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The right to freedom from degrading treatment seems vague. So, if a parent spanks her child, is that considered degrading treatment? What about grounding? Or removing privileges for bad behavior?

Freedom of opinion and expression takes in a lot of ground. If a child’s opinion differs from the parents, under this law, the child wins. In fact, if he wants to, he can sue his parents in court for violating his rights. If he feels like he wants to express himself in anyway that his parents deem unacceptable, they are not at liberty to discipline him.

So, if you do not like the thought of your pre-teen son being exposed to online pornography, or cringe when you think about Internet predators – well, too bad. Under this provision, any expression that your child wants to be exposed to is all right. After all, it is your opinion versus his. And his wins.

The rights to adequate standards of living and to health and health services make it necessary for the government to take over the health of America’s children. So, like the laughable universal healthcare, the U.N. now wants to say whether young Americans are getting the healthcare they need. This means that parents are no longer responsible for taking their children to the doctor, the government is. And, if they rule that your doctor is not good enough, watch for them to take your child to a place they deem acceptable.

Finally, the right to education. The U.N. has already laid claim to the world’s children under UNESCO, or the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Launched in 1946, the program set out to take the training of children away from the parents.

Those of us who were home-schooled, or even attended a private school, cringe when we think of the government mandating a public education. The U.N. is trying to sneak UNESCO into American homes under yet another disguise.

So, the CRC is set to run America’s parents between a rock and a hard place. Luckily, the treaty has not been ratified by Congress, although it has already been signed. Do not get happy just yet. A U.S. federal district court’s rulings state that the CRC is already customary law. This means that we have to abide by it even if the Senate never ratifies it.

And as a final note, I know a woman who would make it her goal as president to get the CRC ratified. Like husband, like wife. Just a bit of insight from a concerned American citizen.

Lindsay is a senior studying journalism.