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United States News Title: Want to Defend Civil Liberties? Don’t Look to the ACLU. After Kaminer brought attention to the memo, the ACLU wrote a letter to the Journal insisting that the organization will “continue to defend the speech rights of the unpopular.” However, the problem for the ACLU is not just that this latest controversy has undermined its reputation for being principled. It’s that the ACLU, while having done lots of commendable work over the years, has been putting politics over principle for decades—and is either in denial or uninterested in correcting its organizational problems. Last summer, the ACLU took up the case of white supremacists who wished to hold a rally at a public park in Charlottesville, Va., after city officials tried to shut down the event. The ACLU prevailed legally, as they should have under the First Amendment, but the rally took a tragic turn. Angry counterprotesters descended on the town, police mismanaged the event, and a white supremacist drove a car through the crowd, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. After the rally, some 200 of the ACLU’s 1,300 full-time employees signed a letter criticizing the organization’s leadership for continuing to defend the speech rights of those with whom the employees disagree. “Our broader mission—which includes advancing the racial justice guarantees in the Constitution and elsewhere, not just the First Amendment —continues to be undermined by our rigid stance,” the letter says. “This letter has to be seen for what it is—a repudiation of free-speech principles,” Michael Meyers, another former ACLU board member, told the New York Times last year. But based on this latest internal memo, the pressure applied to the organization after Charlottesville appears to have worked. The ACLU’s reaction to Charlottesville is a sadly ironic mirror image of the stand it took that perhaps most cemented the reputation of the organization as a principled defender of speech. Between 1977 and 1978, the ACLU fought a tense battle in both the courts and in the court of public opinion for the right of neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois. Its defense of Nazis resulted in a mass exodus from the ACLU that left the organization with a substantial budget deficit, but it was worth it. The ACLU won a landmark First Amendment case at the Supreme Court, National Socialist Party v. Skokie, the long-term benefits of which far outweighed the potential indignity of watching a small group of hateful men play dress-up and wave swastikas (the march through Skokie never occurred; the neo-Nazis staged a rally in Federal Plaza in Chicago instead). Unfortunately, recent decades provide plenty of evidence that the contemporary ACLU leadership regards free speech as secondary to other political goals. In 1999, the ACLU filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court in favor of anti-abortion protesters challenging “buffer zone” laws that keep them away from abortion clinics. In 2007, however, the national ACLU overruled the opinion of a state chapter in Massachusetts when the local chapter came out in opposition to a state buffer zone law even stricter than the one the ACLU had opposed in 2000. This put the ACLU on the wrong side of a law restricting the First Amendment that was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in 2014. After opposing campaign finance laws for decades on the grounds that they restrict free speech, in 2010, the ACLU changed its position when it came under fire from liberal supporters in the wake of the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court case, which loosened campaign finance restrictions. It apparently didn’t matter that the Obama administration’s deputy solicitor general had told the Supreme Court that campaign finance laws entitled the government to ban books. The ACLU responded to criticism of its support for Citizens United by voting to change the organization’s position to accept “reasonable” campaign finance restrictions, a limitation the organization never bothered to define. And in 2015, the organization abandoned its 20-year support of Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) laws just as those laws were beginning to be invoked to defend Christians who did not wish to be compelled to provide services for gay weddings. (The ACLU is currently suing a grandmother in Washington state for her home and personal assets after she refused to make floral arrangements for the wedding of a gay customer to whom she otherwise faithfully sold flowers for nine years.) In a Washington Post op-ed, an ACLU staff member argued that the organization couldn’t support RFRA laws because the laws would protect businesses that object to paying for the birth control of employees; the ACLU also couldn’t support Catholic bishops who have the temerity to receive public funds to take care of unaccompanied migrant children and not provide them with abortions. To argue that these concerns should be given priority over freedom of conscience or religious freedom is unpersuasive, to put it mildly. And, of course, the ACLU was repeatedly called out by pro-life activists for refusing to take a position on the brazenly unconstitutional compelled speech in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. The June 26 Supreme Court ruling in that case invalidated a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers to tell pregnant women about abortion. Meanwhile, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal group which won this case (and eight other Supreme Court cases in the last seven years), has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for taking on the types of cases that the ACLU could once be counted on to defend. While it would be nice to chalk up the ACLU’s problems to the political tumult of the last decade, it’s worth noting that its reputation has always been overblown and the forces now destroying the ACLU from within are the predictable result of phenomena endemic to progressive institutions. In 1985, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky wrote a prescient Public Interest essay about why he had left the ACLU decades earlier, when it first began embracing identity politics, promoting causes concerned with equality of outcomes, and distorting notions of equality under the law. “Activists in these other movements moved into the ACLU, and people discomforted by this trend toward support of equal results moved out,” wrote Wildavsky. “The process is self-reinforcing: New policies attract more like-minded adherents. No one has to tell the ACLU membership what to do. They can guess what the equality of the condition requires, and trial and error tells them what catches on with the people who flock to their cause.” Based on the organization’s recent behavior and rhetoric, it appears this process is starting to reach its logical and tragic conclusion. The policy that currently seems most galvanizing to the American Civil Liberties Union is defending its unearned reputation as the arbiter of what is considered “acceptable” free speech, even as it’s pointed out that they no longer defend the civil liberties of people far more respectable than Nazis. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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