WHAT “HUMAN RIGHTS” HIDES IN LEHIGH

How far-left activists invaded a Pennsylvania county to radically transform local politics

This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with its permission.

In today’s America, run by a government built on a bureaucracy which uses words to conceal rather than explain, neutral-sounding phrases serve as covers for coercion. Under the labels “human rights” and “humanitarianism,” in the last year alone, State Department and USAID-linked nonprofits facilitated unauthorized border crossings which enabled human trafficking; and the Health and Human Services Department reversed a Trump-era ruling protecting doctors who followed their religious beliefs.

But human rights are also spreading coercion in more insidious ways, and the rise of the concept in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, is a case in point. There, in a valley between two Appalachian mountain ridges sixty miles Northwest of Philadelphia, a place with a population of 375,000 where healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation/warehousing are the drivers of economic activity, “human rights” laws are creating the conditions for modern-day witch hunts.

Digging into the drivers behind this push reveals networks of operators at the state, local, and national levels whose agenda is a microcosm of how “human rights” and its movers function— allowing administrators and ideologues to take power at the expense of representative government.  

“Human Rights” Comes to Lehigh

In February—in the name of a sweeping abstraction straight from the councils of the State Department or the United Nations, “eradicat[ing] discrimination”—the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners approved “human rights” legislation “establish[ing] prohibitions against discrimination in employment, housing, education and health care, and public accommodations.”

It protected from discrimination citizens based on

…race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability…citizenship status, ancestry, genetic information, marital status, familial status, having a GED rather than high school diploma, having a relationship or association with a disabled person, source of income, height, weight, veteran status, use of guide or support animals, use of mechanical aids, and being a victim of domestic and sexual violence.

And the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners created “a countywide Human Relations Commission [appointed by the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners] that would receive and consider complaints of discrimination, which could then be referred to other agencies for action.” The penalties it is charged to deliver to violators include compelling them “to change practices, make restitution, and . . . pay a fine of no more than $500.00.”

The other, unspoken penalty is the more lethal one of public stigma, since according to the legislation  the Lehigh Human Relations Commission is sometimes empowered to “schedule and hold a public hearing on the complaint.”

Concrete Objections Get Raised and Brushed Aside

The County Board of Commissioners passed the Human Rights legislation 6–3 along party lines, with the three Republicans and a yes-voting Democrat expressing instructive concerns.

One of the dissenters worried about the effects on people falsely accused. This wasn’t an abstract concern. In states with versions of this legislation, women’s shelters, Catholic hospitals, and small business owners have been subject to lawsuits and ritualized attempts at public shaming, sometimes before any final determination of wrongdoing is reached.

Another County Board commissioner expressed reservations about the power the legislation gave to the unelected Human Relations Commission appointed by the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners, and worried that the legislation would create an always-expanding group of protected classes defined by government, deepening social divisions.

These, too, are not abstract concerns. They were at the top of James Madison’s mind when he warned about executives or legislatures creating “powerful machine[s] . . . independent of the people”; and when he wrote that, although “Natural divisions exist in all political societies…it does not follow that artificial distinctions . . . should be created, and then formed into checks and balances . . . with the people.”

The “aye” voting County Board commissioners’ responses were straight out of a session in Geneva or Washington: indiscriminate appeals to emotions and ideals. As one put it, “The reason that I’m OK with [the bill] . . . is because when I see someone who’s expressing pain . . . I say that . . . the responsibility . . . [is to] protect them.”

According to another, “For the growth of Lehigh County, this is needed.”

A Lawyer Sounds the Alarm

One person who refused to take these proclamations on their face was Joe Maher: A former Republican Lehigh County Board commissioner and a lawyer with a commitment to helping his clients, and the scars to prove it. Maher asked where the legislation fit with the state constitution, since states have been mandated by the Supreme Court since 1907 to have sovereignty over their localities, and since “this act . . . clearly EXPANDED the definition of . . . a ‘human relations’ violation” in “Pennsylvania’s Human Relations Act.”

Tellingly, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act Maher referenced already created a human rights advisory board, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, for the state, and this commission is already used actively in Lehigh County. Allentown, Lehigh’s largest city which has its own human relations commission established by legislation in the 1960s, recently announced that it would “strike up a new partnership with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission” to investigate discrimination claims.

In this context of already-existing enforcement pursuant to state law, why was county legislation expanding protections beyond state law so necessary?

Democrats’ Bigger Agenda in Lehigh and Beyond

Joe Maher has some ideas. In his view, the Democratic playbook in Lehigh never changes. Over a dozen years ago, an Allentown law which Maher later got overturned in the courts, making it illegal to use hand-held cellphones while driving and far outstripping any prior Pennsylvania legislation, was passed by Democrats in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day 2010, just as the Lehigh Human Rights legislation was passed on Valentine’s Day 2024. In Maher’s read, that’s not a coincidence: it’s Democrats trying to land sweeping local legislation amid bursts of good feeling, hoping they eventually serve as precedents for statewide law.

Digging into the human rights legislation’s movers shows that acceding to their moves comes with a cost: the arrival in Pennsylvania of radicalism once confined to Democratic State Departments, United Nations subcommittees and Democratic Socialist meetings.

Centrist Democrats’ Aid the Human Rights Push—and Give it Cover

The seemingly moderate human rights pushers on the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners  include the board chair, Geoff Brace, who sets a tone of “bipartisan” consensus but whose boss, a powerful Pennsylvania legislator, is pushing mental health policies that strengthen the human rights agenda in indirect ways.

Brace’s boss, State Rep. Michael Schlossberg (D), once served on the Allentown City Council, where he sponsored the sweeping cellphone law Maher got overturned, and is now Co-Chair of the Pennsylvania House’s Mental Health Caucus. His special project is introducing psychology into politics, likely linked to the fact that he has “suffered from depression and anxiety my whole life,” which he seems to think are as inevitable for most people as weather.

Schlossberg has an ally in Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s apparently moderate Democratic governor, whose 2023 budget included some of Schlossberg’s proposed investments in mental health and whose recent executive order, partly inspired by Schlossberg, created the state’s first behavioral health council to “deliver timely and quality mental health and addiction care services.” 

These moves are similar to Democratic policies elsewhere, some of which end up supporting sweeping ideological agendas. This trend is holding true in Lehigh, with trauma justifying the investigation of alleged harms under the label of human rights, independent of facts. According to the vice chair of Allentown’s Human Relations commission, LaTarsha Brown, commenting on its work, “When someone feels like they’ve been discriminated against, no matter what the case is, that’s a traumatic experience. And . . . one of the worst things that can escalate your trauma is feeling . . . that nobody hears you” (emphasis added).

Supporting the probability of this confluence of psychology and human rights is the fact that Lehigh’s political “maestro” of human rights has links via his political backers to Shapiro and Brown.

The Human Rights Maestro of Lehigh—and His Powerful Backer

This maestro is Zach Cole-Borghi, a member of the Lehigh Human Relations Advisory Council, the group created by the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners in 2021 which crafted the successful version of the 2024 Lehigh Human Rights legislation, who is also the main drafter of that legislation. Cole-Borghi is one of the seemingly more progressive Democrats elected to the County Board in 2021 and 2023, and he is linked to the group that first drove human rights into Lehigh Valley: Lehigh Valley Stands Up, a chapter of Pennsylvania Stands Up, an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns which proclaims the old socialist principle of “organiz[ing] for power . . . across race, place, and generation.”

Though the fact is hardly referenced in news reports or on X/Twitter, it was Lehigh Valley Stands Up which drove the creation by the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners of the 2021 Human Relations Advisory Council that led to the 2024 Human Rights legislation. Lehigh Valley Stands Up pushed for the creation of the Council based on the fact that a Spanish speaker was allegedly hung up on by a Lehigh 911 operator, and then died in the fire he called to report. Though, according to reports, “the victim first called 911 at 11:22 a.m. and police arrived on the scene three minutes later and firefighters two minutes after that,” Lehigh Valley Stands Up demanded that the County Board of Commissioners create a Human Relations Advisory Council and “apologize for the role of white supremacy in the county’s history, acknowledge the Latino community’s pain and hire more Latinos.” On October 27, 2021, it reported success:

Tonight, activists spoke for 3 hours at @LehighCounty Commissioners meeting. We demanded a fair human relations advisory council and it passed unanimously!! It won’t bring back the lives lost, but it’s a powerful first step. #PowerOfThePeople

“Human Rights’” Bigger Networks

Lehigh Valley Stands Up and Pennsylvania Stands Up have a wide field of allies. They were backers not just of Zach Cole-Borghi but of Josh Shapiro, and also of LaTarsha Brown, the vice chair of the Allentown Human Relations Commission who justifies its actions on the principle of preventing trauma. They also affiliate with Nikil Saval, the Democratic-Socialist member of the Pennsylvania House who helmed the Leftist magazine n+1, whose editors have gone on to staff publications like the New Yorker, today a major political player pushing Democratic agendas. Saval is also linked to human rights advocates whose work flows through the United Nations and universities like Columbia.

Those bigger networks, the ones setting the language used by Pennsylvania Stands Up and its human rights pushers in Lehigh, are staffed by organizations like Human Rights Watch, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Open Society Foundations, and the United Church of Christ—a liberal Protestant church with a “critical presence” at the U.N., whose Lehigh affiliation had County Commissioners’ Chair Geoff Brace as a board member for eighteen years. These organizations are largely the creation of post-Puritan Protestants who lost the faith but kept a penchant for witch hunts; reform and mostly non-identifying Jews; and socialists, before and after World War II. Many members of these groups, along with progressives of color, staff them today.

In different, related ways, these movers want to replace a faith in God and Country with a faith in universal humanity. In practice, they’re major movers of capital who want a borderless world of money and labor—the main beneficiaries of which are internationalist administrators and the marginalized groups they claim to serve. And they frame their beliefs using idealistic rhetoric and a focus on victimhood, allowing them to paint counterarguments as assaults on compassion.

How to Fight Back

What should opponents of these sweeping new policies do—especially assuming, as seems likely, that Lehigh’s Human Rights legislation spreads across the state via Pennsylvania Stands Up, creating precedents for a statewide bill?

One solution is to mount constitutional resistance in localities and states, as indefatigable activists like Joe Maher are doing even now. Another is for the political movement that now defines the Republican Party—an anti-globalist, nationally-focused, traditional religious force—to broadcast the views and tactics of the other side, so that Americans can vote with their eyes open, knowing the full story.