ACLU is leading us down a dangerous path
The following is a StopTheACLU Blogburst:
- Convincing liberals that the ACLU is leading us down a dangerous path is about as productive as talking to a rock. Perhaps this is because I mostly deal with far left liberals who share the same insane views and have the same radical agenda as the ACLU. Anyone who believes that the ACLU is there to purely defend the Constitution is naive at best. Surely there are some moderate liberals out there that can concede that the organization is in need of reform. [list:5d0fe]
This is nothing more than demonizing people you do not agree with. And it implies that the far left is the only political group that is pro-ACLU or has similar views. I am neither a liberal or a democrat, neither conservative or republican. I have many views that are libertarian, and otherwise, am moderate. Liberty is the keystone of my political views. This is not far right versus far left, both groups which I think are for the most part, extremely nutty. Rarely is something, be it a person, political group, religious group, what have you a black and white entity.
Next, I don't think anyone is saying that the ACLU is without problem or is always right. In that sense, any person or group needs to constantly be reforming itself and improving itself, righting past wrongs and the like. This is not something the ACLU is different with than any other group however. Also, it is understood that any group with any intent is not purely motivated. That is true of any working organization or person. You've gotten off to a bad start by sweeping generalities across the ACLU that apply to any group.
But if they saw how the Left Win WingNuts treated the WaPo Omsbudman recently they are probably afraid to say anything.
A balanced society can not survive resting in the fringe. A Nation only concerned with security will drift toward a police state, and one that follows the absolutist views of liberty like the ACLU will drift toward anarchy.
If ensuring that American citizens retain their constitutional rights is absolutist, then sign me up as an absolutist! Having Constitutional rights will not lead to anarchy, but lack of Constitutional rights will lead to tyranny. I understand that many religious fundamentalists desire such tyranny however. A seizing control of the United States government, enforcement of religious control, and then tyranny through religious government which enforces its big brother mindset of controlling the behavior of dissenters. Unfortunately, it is not too difficult to encounter those who desire this direction for America. Fundamentalist muslims from without, and fundamentalist christians from within. What a mess for liberty.
The ACLU proudly display a banner that states,
Keep America Safe and Free, but any honest person will admit that the ACLU have done nothing for the safety of America. As a matter of fact, all evidence leads to
quite the opposite. The ACLU are always ready to put the security of America at risk in the pursuit of its
absolutist views of liberty.
Many of the ACLU's former leaders have noticed the irresponsible shifting of the ACLU away from true civil liberty protection into a much more dangerous agenda. For example take the words of this
former Executive Director of the ACLU:
The right to express unpopular opinions, advocate despised ideas and display graphic images is something the ACLU has steadfastly defended for all of its nearly 80-year history.
Protecting liberty does not in and of itself lead to decreased security. However, freedom is not free as they say, and sometimes security will cost freedoms. I do not think forfeiting any is good though, because it opens the door to allow more to be taken. Constitutional rights are never to be violated.
But the ACLU, a group for which I proudly worked as executive director of the Florida and Utah affiliates for more than 10 years, has developed a blind spot when it comes to defending anti-abortion protesters. The organization that once defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to demonstrate in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., now cheers a Portland, Ore., jury that charged a group of anti-abortion activists with $107 million in damages for expressing their views. Gushed the ACLU's press release:[list:5d0fe]
"We view the jury's verdict as a clarion call to remove violence and the threat of violence from the political debate over abortion."
Were the anti-abortion activists on trial accused of violence? No. Did they threaten violence? Not as the ACLU or Supreme Court usually defines it, when in the context of a call for social change.
The activists posted a Web site dripping with animated blood and titled "The Nuremberg Files," after the German city where the Nazis were tried for their crimes. Comparing abortion to Nazi atrocities, the site collected dossiers on abortion doctors, whom they called "baby butchers." ...
This is ugly, scary stuff. But it is no worse than neo-Nazi calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people, or a college student posting his rape fantasies about a fellow coed on the Web, both of which the ACLU has defended in the past.
None of the anti-abortion group's intimidating writings explicitly threatened violence. Still, the ACLU of Oregon refused to support the defendants' First Amendment claims. Instead, it submitted a friend-of-the-court brief taking no one's side but arguing that speech constitutes a physical threat only when the speaker intends his statement to be taken as one.
And how is the person threatened supposed to know the intent of the threatener?
...Before anti-abortion zealots started getting sued, the ACLU had much more tolerance for menacing speech. Few of the 20th century's great social movements were entirely peaceable. The labor, civil-rights, antiwar, environmental and black-power movements were an amalgam of violence, civil disobedience and highly charged rhetoric. But to gag fiery speakers who call for harm to the establishment because others in the movement pursue their political goals with fists, guns or bombs would do terrible damage to strong, emotive pleas tot social change. It is something neither the ACLU nor, thankfully, the courts have countenanced in the past.
That's why in 1969 the ACLU helped defend a Ku Klux Klan member who had called for violence against the president, Congress and the Supreme Court. At the ACLU's urging, the Supreme Court ruled that speech advocating violence was constitutionally protected unless it incited imminent lawless action and was likely to produce such action. This case was later used to defend the speech of black militants.
The ACLU also applauded a 1982 Supreme Court decision that found that speeches promising violent reprisals were protected by the First Amendment. During the civil-rights movement, a leader of the NAACP called for "breaking the necks" of blacks who violated a boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi, and published a list of those who did. Some of the boycott violators were beaten. The court ruled that despite the atmosphere of fear, all the speeches and lists were part of a debate on a public issue that needed to be "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."
I would argue that the Constitution doesn't protect all of these extreme positions of the ACLU, but that isn't the point he is trying to make. The issue is the ACLU's curious commitment to "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" free speech when it involves things such as virtual child pornography, but not when it involves a something like a boss making racially offensive statements.
This may show some examples of change the ACLU has undergone through it's existence. However, it will take me quite a while to sort through the misleading things said and the facts. I have read several of the links you have posted, and there is more opinion than fact. And the facts I will have to sort through and see what is true and what is misleading, which may take days. Then of course, there may be an element of how the ACLU is setup that may allow various stances to be taken. But as I intimated earlier, such flaws are standard for any group or person. Things evolve throughout time and mistakes will be made or things done that become something that should have been done differently. However, from what you have posted thus far, it looks that the vast majority is ill-informed, opinionated to a ridiculous extent and bark without bite in substance. I will continue to read and sort through and see what does even have some substance. Of course I am well aware of the bias against the ACLU by many fundamentalists who as I said before seek religious tyranny. It is a shame that will prevent legitimate and well reasoned points to come forth about what problems exist with the ACLU.
Unfortunately, there are some people who are so hypnotized by the ACLU's absolutist views and of the ACLU's campaign for
pedophilia and
child pornography that they are prepared to defend an organization that has become a shadow of its former self--a group that lets its idealistic and skewed understanding of the establishment clause trump freedom of religion and freedom of speech.[/list:u:5d0fe]
Stop the ACLU had the opportunity last year of
interviewing a former ACLU lawyer. He was concerned with much of the same things.
The ACLU played a helpful role in the civil rights movement defending these people, and I can’t turn my back on that. I have to give credit where credit is due.†“But….that being said, what they have done in the past is completely eviscerated by what they do in the present. The ACLU has become a fanatical anti-faith Taliban of American religious secularism.â€Â
As I have said before, not granting special priveledge to your religion is not anti-religion. Fundamentalists seem to have this absurd view that if you do not grant special rights to christianity in government and society, that you are anti-christianity. People who value liberty are for freedom of belief, not against people believing and practicing that belief. What they are against however, is granting special privelidge to a certain religion. That would be a part of the aforementioned religious tyranny.
“The ACLU is involved in the secular cleansing of our history. This is not just a fight about free exercise, but about the protection of our American history. The ACLU want to deny America the knowledge of their Christian heritage.â€Â
It seems that the many of the ACLU's greatest critics came from their very ranks.
The division within the ACLU will continue as long as the ACLU continues on the irresponsible, hypocritical path it is on. America needs a civil liberties union, sadly the ACLU isn't doing that job. If the ACLU succeeds in the dangerous direction it is steering America, they will ironically be putting in jeapordy the very liberty they claim to protect.
This may be the most ridiculous part. America is not founded on the christian religion, so other than an essentially irrelevant fact of some founders perhaps having been christian or that America has had a mostly christian populace since it's inception I don't know what that would be referring to. This is a lie touted by the fundamentalist/dominionist crowd who desire christian religious tyranny. Again, not granting special privelidges to christians is not equivalent to being anti-christian. The ACLU defends civil liberties of the members of any religion, christians included as has been shown before. The ACLU is perhaps not the most ideal organization to protect liberty(and I will say I do not agree with all of the stances taken by them), but none are. It is certainly much better than allowing dominionist/fundamentalist groups to pseudo-protect liberty. That alternative is nothing more than a movement to destroy Constitutional liberty and bring forth tyranny of a religious government. At least for the most part they do not mask their intentions in any meaningful way, so that at least they are easy to be aware of.
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Sorry for the abruptness.