Wendy Kaminer: ACLU absent, silent on important First Amendment cases because of Leftist politics
Posted on May 22, 2007
Wall Street Journal: The American Liberal Liberties Union
“ACLU Defends Nazi’s Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters,” the humor magazine The Onion announced in 1999. Those of us who loved the ACLU, and celebrated its willingness to defend the rights of Nazis and others who had no regard for our rights, considered the joke a compliment. Today it’s more like a reproach. Once the nation’s leading civil liberties group and a reliable defender of everyone’s speech rights, the ACLU is being transformed into just another liberal human-rights group that reliably defends the rights of liberal speakers.
This transformation is gradual, unacknowledged and not readily apparent, since evidence of it lies mainly in cases the ACLU does not take. It’s naturally easier to know what an organization is doing (and advertising) than what it is not doing. But a review of recent free-speech press releases turns up only a handful of cases in which ACLU state affiliates defended the rights of conservative, anti-gay or otherwise politically incorrect speakers. And lately the national organization has been remarkably quiet in several important free-speech cases and controversies.
One of the clearest indications of a retreat from defending all speech regardless of content is the ACLU’s virtual silence in Harper v. Poway, an important federal case involving a high-school student’s right to wear a T-shirt condemning homosexuality. Of course, the ACLU doesn’t speak out on every case, but historically it has vigorously defended student speech rights, as its Web site stresses. It is currently representing a student in a speech case before the Supreme Court, Morse v. Frederick (involving the right of a student to carry a nonsensical “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at an off-campus event). The ACLU pays particular attention to the right to wear T-shirts with pro-gay messages in school, proudly citing cases in which it represented students wearing pro-gay (as well as anti-Bush) T-shirts. This year, the ACLU awarded a Youth Activist Scholarship to a student who fought the efforts of her school to bar students from wearing T-shirts that said “Gay, Fine by me.”
So, in 2004, when Tyler Chase Harper was disciplined for wearing a T-shirt declaring his religious objections to homosexuality, civil libertarians might have expected the ACLU to protest loudly. Mr. Harper was barred from attending classes when he wore the anti-gay T-shirt to school on an official “Day of Silence,” when gay students taped their mouths to symbolize the silencing effect of intolerance. Represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, he sued the school district. That same year, the ACLU initiated the first of two actions against a Missouri school that punished students for wearing “gay supportive T-shirts,” eventually securing a promise from the school to “stop censoring,” the ACLU Web site boasts. Mr. Harper, however, was unsuccessful in his quest to stop school censorship. In a patronizing, anti-libertarian decision in which Judge Stephen Reinhardt stressed the imagined feelings of gay students, the Ninth Circuit rejected Mr. Harper’s First Amendment claims. (There was a sharp dissent from Judge Alex Kozinski.)
Perhaps the ACLU was observing its own prolonged Day of Silence, because, while it pays close attention to federal appellate court decisions on civil liberties, it effectively ignored this terrible precedent, even when Mr. Harper appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case as moot because Mr. Harper had graduated but took the unusual step of vacating the decision so that it no longer exists as precedent (no thanks to the ACLU). Mr. Harper’s younger sister, still in school, continued pressing his claims and her case is pending before the Ninth circuit. The ACLU has not adopted her cause either.
She also addresses the ACLU’s silence on campus liberty issues.
This case does not appear to be anomalous. Despite its professed commitment to religious liberty, for example, the ACLU tends to absent itself from cases on college campuses involving the associational rights of Christian student groups to discriminate against gay students, in accordance with their religious beliefs. But conservative students might be grateful for the ACLU’s absence. Consider its intervention in a successful federal court challenge to an unconstitutional speech code at Georgia Tech, brought by the Alliance Defense Fund in 2006 on behalf of two conservative religious students. The ACLU of Georgia filed an amicus brief proposing a substitute but still overbroad “anti-harassment” policy that included a prohibition on “injurious communications . . . directed toward an individual because of their characteristics or beliefs.” In other words: Students should be punished for sharply criticizing or satirizing each other’s beliefs if their remarks are deemed “injurious.” Occasionally an ACLU affiliate does intervene in defense of politically incorrect speech and vigorous debate on campus. But the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE) has become a much more reliable advocate for the rights of all college students, regardless of ideology or religion. (I serve on both FIRE’s advisory board and the board of the Massachusetts ACLU affiliate.)
I posted about this previously: John Leo’s great City Journal piece– the ACLU’s silence on campus speech
It was pointed out when I previously posted the ACLU’s relative silence on campus speech suppression that the ACLU itself has a “policy†on campus speech codes and that ACLUers are on the board of FIRE. My answer: so what? A single 13 year-old statement and few letters here and there to universities over the years hardly excuses the ACLU from its conspicuous non-involvement in fighting the most tyrannical institutions in America. It has representation on FIRE’s board? Again: so what? Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia were on the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Leo brings the real reason to the surface — the conflict between the ACLU’s support for boutique radical causes and the money that flows from this has forced this organization to sacrifice any pretense of being true defender of the First Amendment. These speech codes and other various freedom and thought-killing university policies that silence any opposition to the radical multi-culti, homosexual agenda are set up specifically to favor those same groups that the ACLU has aligned with — politically and financially.
For information on an organization truly fighting campus tyranny, go to the Alliance Defense Fund’s Center for Academic Freedom. Most recently, ADF has entered the fray to defend an Arizona State University student who refused to be mocked in mandatory RA “tolerance†training and was sanctioned by the university for it. Things like “tolerance†and “diversity†“training†are the mutant offspring of the anti-liberty worldview of the ACLU and its allies. That these Orwellian programs exist and that the ACLU has done little to stop (and has even promoted!) them is no surprise to those with open eyes about the true goals of the ACLU.
Also here: ACLU, where are you? Campus tyranny and the ACLU’s silence.
As “the foremost defender of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights,†(Glib Note: I’m sure our men and women in the US Armed Forces would have a little problem with this gas-baggish self-description) you’d think that the ACLU would be laying waste to the fascistic regimes that have implemented and enforced the constitutional abominations known as speech codes and “non-discrimination policies†on university campuses all across the country. I don’t believe in criticizing a group when an individual case arises and that group happens to not have been involved in that singular incident. However, the university campus as whole feels it (yes, I speak of “it†as a monolith because this issue is a fixture at most public universities in the country, I’ll get to that) is exempt from the First Amendment…supposedly the ACLU’s bread and butter. No other government entity has so systematically and unapologetically violated, as a matter of published policy, the very basic freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.
So why has the ACLU ignored such an obvious target that would allow it to demonstrate its First Amendment fealty? Well it’s just another example of the ACLU’s hypocrisy. The university is the last station in what the ACLU hopes will have been a steady diet and rigorous regimen of Leftist orthodoxy from birth (and instant abandonment in day care) until at least 22. The old saying goes, “Give me a child until seven and I’ll give you the man,†but groups like the ACLU and their sub-intellectual allies in the universities want to three-up that just to make sure they’ve captured minds and emptied souls. The ACLU allows the fascism (no, this is not hyperbole, it’s calling a spade a spade) to continue without comment because those strong-arm policies marginalize the very people, ideas and organizations the ACLU would gladly see just dry up and go away.
ADF’s David French has a strong take on this over at Phi Beta Cons: The ACLU and Student Speech
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5 Responses to “Wendy Kaminer: ACLU absent, silent on important First Amendment cases because of Leftist politics”
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“becoming”?!? An organization founded by Communists to protect Communists is “becoming very selective”?!?
The ACLU hates… HATES… Christians so much they will only defend the religious rights of non-Christians, attack anything with a hint of our Judeo-Christian historical legacy, and will propagate self-delusional lies.
Example, remember when they dowdified the First Amendment to remove ‘Freedom of Religion’?:
Reading comprehension not a “SecularFundamentalist” strength
.
Cue the trolls who will be along shortly to point out those
few token cases the ACLU uses to try to feign equality.
.
The ACLU reminds me of the liberals I knew during the 60’s when they would say some of my best friends are black.
Now the ACLU might say some of our best cases have been on behalf of Christians.
It’s a neat little no-win situation you’ve set up there, isn’t it? Here
you are, gloating over criticism that
the ACLU isn’t doing it’s job, but you constantly criticize it when it IS
doing its job. You constantly disagree with the ACLU’s positions, except when
it’s position agrees with yours–except then it’s deceptive tokenism.
And Dane needs to get a clue as to what “Freedom of Religion” entails and DOES
NOT entail.
What are you talking about gary? Did you start drinking for Memorial Day already? What you wrote is utterly incomprehensible.
What Dane is referring to is for a time the ACLU had removed the religion clauses when it “re-pronted” the First Amendment on its website. Of course, until the WSJ busted the ACLU doing so. It’s pretty ugly and pretty revealing.
Opinion Journal (Jan. 11, 2005): Dowdifying the Constitution