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.
The ACLU has NO right to interfear with my Rights!
I am familiar with the screed. The fact is that the ACLU has helped to curb police state abuses. Another fact is that not everything the ACLU does is to my liking. A blanked condemnation is not helpful.
If the ACLU is so concerned about the LAW being enforced, why won't they take any action against the illegal immigrants? Why won't they document THEIR illegal activities?
The ACLU is the extreme left wing branch of the extreme left wing Dimocrat party currently being led by drunk Teddy Kennedy and his comrade in crime Bob "The Grand Kleagle" Byrd of the KKK branch in South Carolina.
ACLU = American Communist Left United!
The ACLU is a subversive organization that should be recognized as such by our Federal Goobermint.
ACLU = Anti Christian Lawyer's Union
Oh, so it's a screed if written by a conservative?
What police state abuses are you refering to?
ACLU = Always Condemning Life Unabashedly
This is a conservative website. It is not a conservative wing-nut site although there are plenty of you here.
Henry Ford organized his company for the purpose of manufacturing automobiles. His goal was to offer a good product, fairly priced, for the common man to own.
Early in the history of mass market manufacturing, the unions, which were little more than organized gangs of thugs, set out to organize the workers at automobile plants. Being the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, Ford was the major target. Now old Henry was a sly sort of fellow, well versed in the psychology of overcoming adversaries, and his offer to his workers was, yeah, you can join the union if you want, but your wages will DROP to the level the unions are asking for. Then he always made sure his workers were paid just a little more in terms of hourly wages than the unions had won from Hudson or Dodge or General Motors. Thus it was not economically sensible for the worker to insist on unionization, as Ford was already paying better than anybody else, and overall, the working conditions were still better than those offered by the other manufacturers.
Still the organizers showed up at the gates of the Ford plants, trying to lure away the workers as the left or arrived for their shifts. To keep the plant open, the private guards, augumented by the Dearborn police, rounded up and carted away the union agitators, who had in mind the objective of breaking up the Ford Motor Company. Understandably, Henry was not disposed to view this favorably.
Wherein the ACLU became involved, trying to drag Henry into court for years, to force a vote on the union. Henry beat them at every turn, because of their Communist sympathies, which did not sit well with the courts at the time. Remember this was in the 1930's and the New Deal had not yet had an opportunity to get their own people on the bench. Most of the judiciary then were leftover appointees from the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, and it took years to get the New Deal approved by the courts. When it finally reached the point that a sufficient number of more liberal judges were sitting on the bench, and it looked like Henry could not keep the unions out any longer, Henry called up Walter Reuther of the UAW and invited him in to organize the workers. Even with this virtual blank check, the unions could not organize everywhere in the Ford industrial complex, as Ford would continue to pay the workers who chose not to join the union a higher wage than the union was demanding for their members.
Union thugs still took Henry's son Edsel out back and beat him up so badly he later died of the injuries, so they did not have such clean hands either. Then they had to deal with Clara.
I don't read packaged screeds.
After his defeat in Congress, Barr was hired by the ACLU to fight the Bush Administration provisions in the Patriot Act, as well as some other issues with which Barr disagreed.
If I'm not mistaken, I recall seeing Barr on TV a month or two ago claiming he remains employed by the ACLU as a spokesman against the federal govt's policy of looking into the backgrounds of potential terror groups forming in the US, or something like that.
The "stink" I'm concerned with is the ACLU Commie connections. You won't find many conservatives that think too highly of the ACLU.
Some of us wingnuts don't think much of the unions since they also have quite a few connections to the commies.
I wish they were closer to the communists than the mafia.
Agreed 100%.
Like the ACLU?
"A red is any dirty SOB who wants more than we're paying."
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