Posted on 12/01/2002 10:43:06 AM PST by RCW2001
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ACLU, Once Branded Ultraliberal, Sees Membership Surge After Sept. 11 Terror Attacks
The Associated Press
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| W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 1 — Whether protecting the disenfranchised or standing up for the right to offend, the American Civil Liberties Union has sided with those claiming they were wronged, even if it meant a distinctly minority stand.
But since Sept. 11 and the government's expansive campaign of monitoring and detention, people are turning to the 82-year-old organization to help safeguard their liberties. Among them are conservatives who made the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" a political insult, but who now are signing up. "Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization." executive director Anthony Romero said. There are now 330,000 dues-paying members, 50,000 of whom joined after the attacks. The group has been in the thick of legal challenges to the government's broadening anti-terror powers. Last week, in response to an ACLU lawsuit, the government agreed to tell the group by mid-January which documents it is willing to release about its increased surveillance activities. Especially notable among the new enthusiasts are conservatives who once thought the ACLU represented everything that was wrong with the left. "They are very useful and productive force in jurisprudence," said Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill. Conservatives such as Hyde are mindful of the history of an organization that was lonely in its defense of positions now accepted as universal: Blacks who suffered spurious prosecutions in the 1930s, Japanese interned in the 1940s, books banned as obscene now regarded as part of the literary canon. Yet the group continues to exasperate some with its uncompromising positions against a Ten Commandments monument in a Frederick, Md., park, against the government's attempt to get libraries to use computer filters to block sexually explicit material from children, against drug sweeps that it claims are racially motivated. "Some of their positions are extreme, such as objecting to metal detectors in high schools" where there has been a high incidence of violence, Hyde said. For the first time, the ACLU is spending part of its $50 million annual budget on a national television commercial. An actor portraying John Ashcroft crosses the phrase "We the People" from the Constitution as a narrator says the attorney general has "seized powers for the Bush administration no president has ever had." "This focus on civil liberties post-9/11 has been a wonderful opportunity to reach out to constituencies who would never have thought of the ACLU as their home," said Nadine Strossen, the ACLU's president. The organization has budgeted $3.5 million for a campaign that asks Americans to monitor their government monitors and report abuses. It is a mirror image to the government's plan to empower some Americans to check on their neighbors, under a program known as the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. "When you have the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country saying either you're with me or against me, and that your tactics aid the terrorists, that rubs people the wrong way," Romero said. That includes conservatives who bridle at government intrusions into privacy. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., have said they will consider serving as consultants for the group when they leave Congress next month. Hyde has worked with the ACLU to protect free speech on campuses and limit the right of authorities to seize assets. "I'm glad the ACLU raises the objections it does, because it forces the government and Congress to be mindful of First Amendment rights," he said. In 1989, Hyde railed against the organization as a smirking opponent of the rights of the unborn. Before that, he had said it was part of a "Bermuda Triangle" swallowing up Reagan administration anti-crime measures. Hyde chuckles at those memories, and even admits he may have used the "card-carrying member of the ACLU" phrase coined by Vice President George Bush in his 1988 presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis. Probably the ACLU's most unpopular stand came in 1978, when it successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb. ACLU membership dropped by 15 percent after that. Its insistence on removing Christmas and Hanukkah decorations from publicly owned property did not help, either. Strossen says nothing has fundamentally changed; defending Nazis' right to march then is the same as defending the right to roam the Internet now. "One person's stigma is another's badge of honor," she said. "Putting your money where your mouth is means defending those whose views are counter to yours." Still, the organization says it now recognizes a need to reach out, and some conservatives are glad about that. "The one thing that I find very encouraging about all of this is that people are willing to move beyond their ideological trenches and join forces," said Ward Connerly, a conservative whose frustration with the ACLU's support for affirmative action led him to found the competing American Civil Rights Institute. "If they keep hiring more Bob Barrs, I might renew the membership I canceled in 1962." |
The ACLU is not defending the Constitution, they always come down on the side of any issue that would destroy this country. There are ways of defending personal liberty without joining such an evil organization, I would much prefer that Bob Barr find one of those. Maybe he's gone off the deep end, as a way of dealing with his failure to get Clinton removed.
Their biggest target is the mythical wall between church and state. They absolutely reject the notion of anything Christian in the public sphere, but they defend the right of children to view pornography in public libraries. They have no problem with homosexuals starting a recruiting group on a junior high campus, but blanch at the thought of a Bible study on that same campus.
Their perversion of the First Amendment has become so accepted in common law that people don't understand that it has no historical basis whatsoever.
Never do they defend a conservative cause. It is perfectly acceptable for children to be taught about Islam in public schools, because Islam is destructive to the West. When people are robbed of their guns by overzealous "law enforcement," the ACLU is oddly silent. They didn't say a word about the murders at the Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas. They don't say a word about the McCain-Feingold Free Speech Suppression Bill that was passed as "Campaign Finance Reform."
If you would trust the ACLU to safeguard your constitutional rights, you'd trust Bill Clinton to babysit your teenage daughter.
The looking-for-work Barr and Armey were employed by the cancerous ACLU as a ploy to look more conservative as the historical revisionism cynically rolls on. And these two intelligent gentlemen realize it very well.
Hiring a few of the token opposition is a well-established leftist tactic. New and more devious paths are needed now by the ACLU in light of the past election bombshells and to get new and desperately-needed sources of donations from any naive, uninformed or deluded, or hopeful souls it can sucker into believing the ACLU is heading in a new direction.
Anyone who thinks the ACLU tiger will change its stripes is delusional. It explicity stated recently that no matter WHO it hires as "consultants" it has NO intention of abandoning any of its long-held core principles (pro-partial birth abortion, pro-gun control/confiscation, God out of schools and public life, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth).
No, the ACLU won't change any of it's core beliefs now or in our lifetime. On that you can rely.
Leni
Who in the name of John Birch would be trying to salvage the ACLU's reputation on Free Republic!?!? Talk about a fool's errand! You could more easily sell sunscreen to a hedgehog.
Sure he will. His contract with the ACLU is for 6 months (180 days!).
The ACLU has also stipulated to Barr he will not meddle in any of the ACLU's other causes except what he was hired for, privacy concerns. He agreed. He will NOT be "working from inside" the ACLU to further conservatism. He has only cheaply and cynically lent his name temporarily so that for propaganda purposes the ACLU can crow about how "non-partisan" and "centrist" it is (which they are already doing, by the way).
In addition to the ACLU's issues I listed briefly above (anti-gun, pro abortion, pro partial-birth abortion, removing God from school and public life, the ACLU also espouses affirmative action, elimination of capital punishment, the protection of the "rights" of Islamic terrorists and the elimination of military tribunals to deal with terrorists.
Others may want to add to this list.
Leni
BZZZTTT! Wrong answer! Care to play again?
The ACLU trumpets its championing of the Bill of Rights -- except those Rights they don't like. The ACLU has, for example, consistently refused to defend the Second Amendment, last year specifically identified as an individual right by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court.
The ACLU has consistently refused to defend the right of a private organization that uses its own money to determine who it wants as members.
The ACLU defends only those rights with which they personally agree. They are simply Marxist collectivists wearing happy-face masks.
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