Muzzled at the ACLU
Posted on June 14, 2006
Natt Hentoff, former member of the ACLU’s national board, writes an article criticizing the ACLU in USA Today.
U.S. newspapers found the irony irresistible. The Roanoke (Va.) Times, for one, noted that the proposal “appears to be a reaction by … Romero to his failed effort to oust two board members who had criticized ACLU policies.”
Actually, one principled dissenter: Michael Meyers, the director and founder of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a longtime ACLU board member, has been forced out from the executive committee and the national board in punishment for going to the news media several times.
Wendy Kaminer, another recidivist dissenter and favorite target of ACLU’s leadership, said the proposal “is preposterous — a violation of everything we’re supposed to stand for.”
The Times reported that in the board session, Romero furiously denounced Kaminer for having told a New York Sun reporter of her disagreement with the leadership’s previous support of a bill in Congress that would regulate advertising by counseling centers run by anti-abortion organizations. Kaminer, who supports a woman’s right to an abortion, was concerned with the legislation’s free-speech problems. She told the Sun she was appalled “that the ACLU is actively supporting this.”
After excoriating her for going to the news media, Romero demanded that another board member, Alison Steiner, “step outside the meeting room, where he chastised her for the look on her face when he was criticizing Ms. Kaminer,” the Times reported.
In an e-mail to the board, Steiner wrote that Romero told her in the corridor that because “I … did not appear ready to join him in ‘getting rid of (Kaminer),’ … I was no better than she was, and then stormed off angrily,” the Times recounted.
Romero, in a tepid letter to the editor that followed in the Times, did not deny that illuminating exchange but noted predictably that the ACLU “exists to defend the right of dissent and the free exchange of ideas.” Then why has he not denounced the very concept of instructing board members to refrain from public dissent? And why is most of the board and ACLU President Nadine Strossen so compliant?
He goes on to discuss how another former board member, Micheal Meyers, dissented on the ACLU’s use of sophisticated technology to collect a wide scope of information about its own members for fundraising efforts, and how the ACLU no longer have Meyers in their membership. Its an excellent and revealing post from an insider on the hypocrisy of the ACLU. Make sure to read the entire thing.
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4 Responses to “Muzzled at the ACLU”
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Syndicate Me
Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship. Rule with an iron fist. Stalin would be proud.
“Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship. Rule with an iron fist. Stalin would be proud.”
Well, stalin killed people. And for speaking out at all. Not for airing dirty laundry.
The victims of stalin are proud of you though.
Of course we can expect censorship from a group dedicated to defending our civil liberties.
No, gfactor, I still think Stalin would have been proud, even though the ACLU doesn’t kill it’s dissenters.