Posted on 03/30/2005 5:14:32 AM PST by alloysteel
On April Fools' Day, the American Civil Liberties Union will show us what a joke its commitment to American civil liberties really is.
April 1, in case you haven't heard, is the launch of the Minuteman Project, an all-volunteer effort by law-abiding American citizens to call attention to the nation's wide open southern border. Hundreds of Americans from New York to Michigan to California will travel down to the U.S.-Mexico border for a month to monitor illegal aliens and alert immigration enforcement officials if they witness law-breaking.
Call it the mother of all neighborhood watch programs.
In doing so, the Minutemen will be exercising their constitutionally protected freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Those would be fundamental civil liberties found in something called the, uh, First Amendment, of which the ACLU is supposed to be the foremost expert and champion. Or so the group and its celebrity supporters say. In sanctimonious new fund-raising ad campaigns, the organization features the likes of liberal actress Holly Hunter, who asks:
Do you want to be heard without fear? I am not an American who believes that questioning or criticizing my government is unpatriotic.
Uh-huh. "Dissent is patriotic," the Left likes to preach. Except, apparently, if the questioning and criticizing deals with the government's abject failure to enforce immigration laws. Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist has been harassed by open-borders activists at his home. The group is reportedly being targeted by savage illegal alien gangsters from Mara Salvatrucha (aka MS-13). Mexican government officials are lobbying American law enforcement officials to suppress the Minutemen's rights to speak and assemble.
But instead of coming to the defense of the Minutemen who are challenging our government, the ACLU has warned the 1,000 volunteers that it will send monitors to document the Americans' activities. Moreover, the ACLU has already threatened lawsuits against the American dissenters for exercising their rights.
This bullying of pro-immigration enforcement activists comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the ACLU's aggressive open-borders agenda – from its support for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, to its opposition to detaining illegal alien terror suspects after 9-11 and profiling foreign visitors from terror-friendly countries, to its efforts to stop local and state law enforcement officers from helping federal homeland security efforts.
ACLU of Arizona spokesman Ray Ybarra argues that the mere presence of the Minutemen at the border constitutes "unlawful imprisonment" of illegal (excuse me, "undocumented") aliens (excuse me, "migrants"). Ybarra told the Washington Times that the ACLU will have lawyers on standby ready to file civil cases against the volunteers. He warned that the Minutemen could "come to our state as 'vigilantes' and end up leaving as 'defendants.'"
The Minutemen have made it clear on their website and in repeated statements that they "will not violate anyone's civil rights, and will not abuse anyone from any country ... We will alert border patrol to the location of illegals, and wait for [the Border Patrol] to come and pick them up. We will follow illegal aliens from a distance and continue spotting them until authorities answer our cell phone and/or back-pack radio calls. All spotting, calls for assistance, and the response from the appropriate authorities will be chronicled and provided to any media representative."
Contrary to the ACLU and mainstream media representations of the group as racists and immigrant-bashers, the Minutemen are a diverse volunteer group that includes Americans of Mexican, Armenian, Russian, Lebanese, Indian and Cuban descent; and black and Native American minorities. Also among the volunteers are 19 legal immigrants from Mexico, Peru, Russia, New Zealand, England, Australia and the Philippines.
By recklessly linking the Minutemen to white separatists and casting them as outlaws, the civil-liberties crowd engages in the very guilt-by-association smear tactics it has so loudly condemned. And in putting the protection of illegal aliens' rights over law-abiding Americans' civil liberties, the ACLU demonstrates on which side of the border its true allegiances lie.
ACLU = Another Constitutional Law Undermined
True, they have gone to great lengths to make an end run around the spirit of the Constitution, as in the "separation of church and state", and in protecting the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. But in each of these cases, the objective has been the same - instill a contempt for the letter of the law, by pushing its application to an extreme. Once the American legal system has riddled with a sufficient number of inconsistencies, then the law may be broken with little fear of successful prosecution. "Patriotism" becomes the "right" to resist a legally constituted rule of law, in favor of the "rights of Man".
One HUGE can of worms has been opened.
Yes indeed.
By the way. Where are the Michelle photos? ; )
Aren't the Minutemen really "undocumented border patrol agents"? Works for me.
You have that completely backwards. The original ACLU was introduced to oppose government excess; not reward expansive government intrusion into private lives. That it then moved toward "private" expression has always been a questionnable expansion of its role.
The ACLU is, and always been, a front for the protection of Communist ideology.
This wasn't even true in the 1930s and most certainly isn't now.
Regardless of whether the ACLU is a "front" for Communism, its actions over the past 30 years are ample evidence that the ACLU is an enemy of the United States. It opposes religion, it opposes US sovereignty, and it opposes the rights of the disabled.
The ACLU was riddled with Communist sympathizers during the 1930's under the benevolent eye of the FDR regime and the New Deal. It was an outgrowth of the "Progressive" movement, and has it roots much more in the French Revolution than in the American Revolution.
To deny the socialist beginnings of ACLU is to deny its present involvement in so many things that have been tacitly accepted by the majority of Americans since the founding of the Republic.
The ACLU is at heart a bloodthirsty bunch of pirates, who specialize in the law, not so much for its active and fair enforcement, as for loopholes.
Anyone here ever seen the movie "Devils Advocate"? Every time I see that movie I think of the ACLU. Al Pacino plays "The Devil", the director of a law firm that is instrumental in changing the way the laws of the United States are interpreted, in order to do human beings harm. His speech towards the end of the movie about building legal precedent is a major eye opener, because thats exactly what is happening thanks to groups like the ACLU and the SPLC.
The ACLU opposes state supported religion.
Please explain what you mean by the other two.
Is former Congressman Bob Barr still with the ACLU??
I will never again have respect for Barr due to his support of the ACLU, no matter how much good the organization did in the past.
In a roundabout way it does. Thanks to the fact that it only tries certain types of cases, there is a clause/loophole that requires any lawyer in a case they represent have their legal fees paid by the state. I'm sure other freepers could tell you more.
I felt the same way about that movie and the relationship to the ACLU.
The ACLU is composed of many local and state organizations and if you would look at some of them you would have a less offensive opinion.
LOL. "Red Measles." Never thought of it that way, but getting into my senior year I think I had developed a mild case myself. Anyone going through the humanities, sociology, or history/law probably has a higher chance of catching that than if you were in the hard sciences, or business.
They have a perfect right to speak in any manner they so choose. They do not have any right to be taken seriously or given any degree of gravitas in matters of philosophical discussion. They are gadflies at best, and the most evil of malefactors at worst.
Here is a link to a site that will give you a better understanding of the communist connections of the ACLU.
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6145
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