President George W. Bush's nomination of John Bolton, a career bureaucrat with a long history of showing contempt for the United Nations, to be the U.S. ambassador to that same body, is just one sign of this administration's lack of respect for the world community.

Another was the way the U.S. delegation disrupted a meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women last week. The gathering of nations that approved the platform for action for women at the historic Beijing conference 10 years ago wanted to issue a simple, one-page statement affirming its commitment to those goals.

But the U.S. delegation held up the statement's approval by trying to insert language saying that nothing in the platform supports abortion or creates any new rights for women.

The platform doesn't even claim that there's an international right to abortion. So this bit of grandstanding was nothing more than a sop to the administration's conservative supporters here at home. The time that could have been spent discussing how much progress these nations have made since Beijing and what obstacles stand in their way was wasted on political posturing. There was no support for the U.S. proposal, which only served to annoy the other nations before our delegation backed off and joined the consensus anyway.

Stunts like this show how the United States, arguably the country where women enjoy the best treatment in the world, is not a gallant defender of women's rights on the world stage. And domestic politics are impeding international efforts to make life better for women in other countries.

"It was so frustrating and so painful to be an American last week in the UN," said Jessica Neuwirth, head of the women's rights group Equality Now and a participant in the meeting. "It was just shameful."

In a week that celebrated International Women's Day, it's worth pointing out that the United States is one of the few countries in the world that hasn't ratified the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted by the UN in 1979. A kind of international bill of rights for women that set up a committee to monitor how well countries are complying, the convention was signed by President Jimmy Carter, but it never has been ratified by the Senate. Supporting broad principles like women's right to vote, to run for office, to have equal access to jobs and to get equal pay, the convention doesn't even mention anything as controversial as abortion.

On the abortion front, one of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to reinstate the global gag rule, which bars non-governmental organizations in other countries from receiving U.S. family-planning funds if they even mention to women that abortion is an option. President Bill Clinton ended the gag rule, but Bush revivied it immediately.

Meanwhile, since 2002 the Bush administration has been withholding financial support for the United Nations Population Fund - $34 million allocated by Congress that first year - on the humbug that some of the money might go to support China's coercive birth control measures. As a result, women in other countries who need health and reproductive services are being denied them.

In spite of Bush's recent vow to defend human rights around the world, we're still half-stepping when it comes to women.

One argument is that we so desperately need the help of some of the most anti-female countries in our war on terrorism that we dare not insist that they change their ways. But some of these countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan - were our allies long before Sept. 11. It's a sad commentary that a government that's willing to sacrifice lives to protect human rights in Afghanistan and Iraq won't insist on women's right to vote, to run for office, drive, and to be free of court-imposed sentences of gang rape in the countries we call our friends.

© 2005 Newsday, Inc.

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