Quote of the day
My favorite example is their inexiplicable support in the 1970s for the right of a group of Nazis and Klansman to yell
“fire” in a crowded theater“we hate Jews” in an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. It’s almost as if the ACLU apologists are so far out in left field that they actually expect conservatives to identify with the Klan or the Nazis, with whom they have nothing ideologically in common.
August 2nd, 2004 at 10:58 am
So the ACLU should selectively decide who is entitled to freedom and who isn’t?
August 2nd, 2004 at 11:00 am
Who said that? But that is what they do, no?
August 2nd, 2004 at 11:04 am
XRLQ nails it indeed:
August 2nd, 2004 at 5:54 pm
First off, the ACLU is not on the side of the Klan or Nazis, they are on the side of freedom, whomever the client may be..including Rush who hasn’t had a lot of nice things to say about the ACLU.
They don’t go after every single case, no organization can. On the 2nd Amendment stuff, yeah it’s lame that they take the “collective” rights argument. But in their defense, they don’t speak in favour of gun control and Wayne LaPierre spoke at the most recent ACLU conference.
Speaking of whom, its not as if the NRA does a wonderful job of protecting the 1 right that they’ve chosen to protect.
XRLQ’s whole they are just anti-Republican bit is also lame. They went after the Clinton Administration as well and had some not so nice comments about Janet Reno as well as attacking Campaign Finance Reform.
August 2nd, 2004 at 7:33 pm
Manish, give me a break. Did you follow those links? If the ACLU is still pretending to be anything other than a hard left organization these days, the author of the letter I got must never have received the memo. The letter is filled with epthithets toward “far-right” this and “radical, freedom-stealing” that, yet manages to escape attacking the left on anything, not even the internment Japanese-Americans during WW II. And explaining away the Second Amendment is not a neutral position at all; it’s a deliberate effort on the part of a liberals to undermine a big part of the argument against gun control, thereby making the job of their explicitly anti-gun brethren (many of whom are ACLU members themselves) that much easier. It is nothing less than a deliberate strategy on the part of the ACLU to … borrowing their pat phrase one more time …. “decimate the Bill of Rights.”
It’s really neato the the ACLU technically opposes campaign finance reform. It would have been neato-er still if they had spent any real political capital in attempting to get McCain-Feingold blocked before it was passed. I’m not asking them to drop everything, but is it too much to ask that a supposedly free-speech organization spend at least as much effort opposing CFR as the NRA did? Or maybe even half as much as the ACLU itself did on the really important issues like capital punishment, the Pledge of Allegiance, race-blind government policies, school choice, gubernatorial recalls or, horror of all horrors, the L.A. County seal. It would be nice if they find a little time to deal with the issues that actually impact civil liberties.
August 2nd, 2004 at 8:45 pm
The ACLU doesn’t in general expend as much political capital as the NRA does on anything. They don’t endorse candidates as a general rule, they don’t do the horse trading that the National Republican Association does to weaken rights to strengthen the electability of the Republican party or help the manufacturers.
AFAIK, the ACLU encouraged their members to write to their members of Congress to oppose CFR and then took it to court when the bill passed. This is pretty much what they always do on most issues.
In terms of the letter you got, it was a fundraising appeal. Yes, generally the ACLU target membership is fairly liberal and of course they are going to target their letters to that demographic. But they still do whats right in terms of protecting freedom most of the time. They aren’t perfect, but they are pretty damn good.
August 2nd, 2004 at 9:33 pm
“Pretty damn good” from a left-liberal perspective, sure. From the perspective of anyone concerned primarily with individual liberty, not good at all. One day they’re using a tortured reading of the Establishment Clause to protect government school monopolies, Another, it’s an even more tortured reading of the equal protection clause, which they used to attempt to force the State of California to discriminate by race. As recently as last fall, they used the same clause as an excuse to try to cancel an election and keep Democrat Gray Davis – no civil libertarian he – in office. Other suits are aimed at keeping prisoners off death row, coercing local governments to abandon all symbols remotely associated with religion, forcing gay marriage, and thwarting democracy in countless other ways which are either antithetical to indvidual liberty or, more commonly, have nothing to do with civil liberties one way or the other.
I don’t object to the ACLU because they are a liberal organization. My objection is to their pretending to be something they’re not.
August 2nd, 2004 at 9:48 pm
Oh give me a break. First off, they didn’t try to thwart the recall, they simply asked that voting equipment that the government agreed to get rid of wasn’t used in the recall. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by school monopolies, but they aren’t stopping private schools from forming and taking students.
Hmm, gee you don’t think that getting people off of death row 48 hours before they are scheduled to die because they happen to be innocent slightly deprives said innocent party of his freedoms or liberties? Denying gay marriage to gays and lesbians is an afront to their liberty without hurting heterosexuals. Cities and towns violating the first amendments separation of church and state is an afront to the liberty of those who practise a different faith.
August 2nd, 2004 at 9:54 pm
oh and before I forget:
yet manages to escape attacking the left on anything, not even the internment Japanese-Americans during WW II.
Are you really trying to claim that the ACLU or the hard left is somehow in favour of this or sees it as anything but a blight on our history?
And explaining away the Second Amendment is not a neutral position at all
Atleast the ACLU hasn’t conspired with a certain political party to legislate gun control in order to get an immunity bill for manufacturers. Or any of the other gun control measures the NRA has tacitly endorsed.
August 2nd, 2004 at 10:00 pm
Manish, you’re wrong. They most certainly DID try to stop the recall, and they came damned close to suceeding. Fortunately, the three hack judges who ruled unanimously in the ACLU’s favor were overturned – also unanimously – by an en banc court. There was nothing wrong with the equipment used that year, nor had the governmetn agreed to get rid of it before 2004. The ACLU simply reneged on the deal, which they had no business forcing in the first place.
As to school monopolies, the ACLU has worked tirelessly to thwart school vouchers, using a tortured theory of the Establishment Clause. Basically, the theory is that if the state allows parents to choose where to educate their kids, and some of them choose religious schools, that constitutes a state endorsement of religion. It’s an utterly idiotic, anti-freedom theory, yet one they were able to persuade 4 out of 9 U.S. Supreme Court Justices to adopt.
The ACLU is opposed to capital punishment across the board. It has nothing to do with guilt vs. innocence, and everything to do with preventing each execution from taking place, period, no matter how overwhemingly the evidence may be.
Your tortured theories on gay marriage and the Establishment Clause are the silliest of all. Gay marriage has never existed as a “right,” so there’s nothing there to deny. The Establishment Clause is a structural limitation on government; it doesn’t give individuals a “right” to do or not do anything. No one has a “right” not to be “affronted.”
August 2nd, 2004 at 11:24 pm
They most certainly DID try to stop the recall
Really? Did they argue in court that the recall was unconstitutional or something like that and say that it should be abolished? Or did they say that they have an agreement with the state whereby the spirit of it was that 2002 would be the last election with the faulty equipment, while the state argued that the agreement was the primaries of 2004. If successful, the case would have only DELAYED the recall not stop it.
As to school vouchers, and your whole tortured interpretation bit, it seems to me that a lot of courts (many with Republican appointed judges) seem to agree that the Constitution makes clear a separation between Church and State.
The ACLUs basis of opposing the death penalty goes to errors (which is similar to their opposition of watch lists) and the way that the death penalty is doled out. They don’t go through watch lists with a fine tooth comb and decide that some people deserve to be on them and they do the same with regards to capital punishment.
As to gay marriage, what can I tell you? Women didn’t have the right to vote either until some civil libertarians came along and passed the 19th Amendment. To my knowledge, the ACLU is not actively arguing that the US Constitution gives gays and lesbians the right to marry, (which to my knowledge can only be defined by the states). They are opposing the FMA which would limit that right as well as pursuing cases in state court which argue that certain state Constitutions guarantee equality. It all comes down to what you see as being the meaning of liberty. To me if me doing it isn’t hurting you, then I’m entitled to do it.
August 3rd, 2004 at 12:29 pm
“Really? Did they argue in court that the recall was unconstitutional or something like that and say that it should be abolished?”
Of course not. That was the objective of the suit, of course, but they wouldn’t be dumb enough to say that (though many of the lawyers they worked with, e.g., Rick Hasen, were).
“Or did they say that they have an agreement with the state whereby the spirit of it was that 2002 would be the last election with the faulty equipment, while the state argued that the agreement was the primaries of 2004.”
Wrong. First, their “agreement” with state was analogous to my “agreement” to pay a mugger rather than get my ass kicked. The state capitulated to legal bullying by the ACLU; they didn’t “agree” about anything. Second, the letter of their extortion/agreement was plain: old systems to replaced on or before March, 2004. Period. The ACLU bullied the “agreement” into place, and then they refused to abide by the terms of their own bullying. They even freely admitted they had no more basis to challenge the 2003 recall election than they had to challenge any of the minor elections held in the same year, or the regularly scheduled gubernatorial election the year before. They simply chose not to attack the election they considered more “legitimate.”
“If successful, the case would have only DELAYED the recall not stop it.”
It would have delayed it for six months, for no good reason other than to allow the legal bullies to flex their muscles and help keep a hack Democrat in office until “recall fever” died down, and an election was held that would systematically favor Democrats over Republicans (hint: only one party had a Presedential primary election). In fact, though, it probably would have delayed the election longer than that, as the new machines are/were not set up to handle the unusually large ballot necessitated by the recall. Most likely, the SOS would have used the new, crappy, ACLU-approved voting machines for the regularly scheduled portion of the March election, and punch cards for the recall. Then the anti-democratic Democrats in the ACLU would have brought a new challenge all over again, just like they’re doing now in Ohio.
I cannot believe you are defending a group that “only” delays elections for six months. Do you realize how nutty that sounds?
As to “my” tortured theory on school vouchers, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. The ACLU and the teachers union are the ones that came up with that theory, not me. My non-tortured theory is much simpler: if a religious education arises because of an act of the state (e.g., school vouchers valid only for religious schools), then we have a First Amendment issue. If it arises because of the decision of a private party (e.g., a parent deciding when/where/if to spend a voucher), we don’t. Fortunately, a majority of Supreme Court Justices agree with me.
As to the death penalty, once again you’re simply wrong. All the phony crap about the death penalty being “unfair,” “racist,” etc. is just a smokescreen, just like their claim that the death penalty is a “barbaric practice” and “not a deterrent” to murder (including repeat offense?). They even have the gall to claim the death penalty is “less popular than the alternatives,” and to argue against it on the grounds that it is so slow and expensive – even while working tirelessly to make it as slow and expensive as possible.
The ACLU’s position on the death penalty has nothing to do with errors, racism, or any of the other crap they throw out. They’re against the death penalty because they’re against the death penalty, period. The rest is just strategy.
I don’t know how you get off comparing gay marriage to women’s suffrage, but even if they were comparable, note how women’s suffrage was enacted: by constitutional Amendment, not by judicial fiat. Opposing FMA is fine, but calling it “radical” is a stretch, and calling it “anti-freedom” is a lie. It has nothing to do with freedom, only government recognition vs. lack thereof. A gay couple doesn’t lose any “freedom” by not being recognized as married any more than a trio or a foursome loses such “freedom” solely because their state does not recognize polygamy. [Criminalizing polygamy, sodomy, etc. is a separate issue altogether.]
My point is not that the ACLU is wrong on all these issues (though it is); it’s that they are a liberal organization, and should stop pretending to be anything else. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anything else. There is something wrong with acting like a bully, which the ACLU routinely does, and there’s even more wrong with pretending to be something you’re not.