Conservatives hate the ALCU partly because they’re so often successful. How can the Anti-Christ Lawyers Union win so often if God is really a member of the GOP?
That, and they hate them for our freedoms.
Me too. I signed up for the minimal membership amount primarily because I wanted to be able to say I’m a card carrying member of the ACLU, but the endless solititation for donations from them and other groups they appear to share their mailing list with have been driving me nuts. I swear, if conservatives wanted to sabotage the left, all they would have to do would be to send minimal donations to the ACLU en mass – the resulting postage from the solititation letters would easily result in net losses for every group from the ACLU to Save the Whales.
I’d guess that the ACLU is perceived as liberal because most of it’s members and staff are liberal because conservatives don’t give a fuck about defending civil rights. I’m sure they’d be happy to have more members.
The ACLU had guts enough to defend the rights of Nazi’s to march in a Jewish community even though it cost them financially when some long time members stopped supporting them.
There’s a lot of anti-conservative vitriol in this thread, which is kind of a shame. Some of it is true, particularly that there are uninformed people who have a knee jerk dislike of the ACLU because they know it’s popular to dislike it.
But I think any advocacy organization like the ACLU is going to eventually anger a lot of people just because people on average are moderate on any issue. The ACLU’s raison d’être is to be a zealous advocate of civil liberties. They’re never going to take the position that an infrignement on civil liberties is reasonable just like NOW won’t support limitations on a woman’s right to control her own body or some pro-gun groups will oppose any limitation on gun ownership (I realize the NRA hasn’t done that). Eventually they take up a cause ‘ordinary’ people can’t support.
Really? You **had **to fight for the Nazi parade in the Jewish neighborhood? Well, yeah, they did. But you can’t expect everyone to understand that.
As you note they do make claim to not “take a position on gun control itself,” but at the same time they state that they feel that its a “collective right” and that the regulation of guns does not raise a “civil liberties issue.” It’s entirely disingenuous for them to claim that that does not add up to a “position on gun control.” And its a strikingly restrictive one given how expansive their interpretations generally are when it comes to the Bill of Rights.
I generally support the ACLU and its actions, especially when it comes to 1st Amendment and privacy laws. But they take positions and action on other issues for which multiple, legitimate viewpoints exist. And in those cases they tend to support positions that are more popular on the left than the right. They support affirmative action, oppose the death penalty, etc. It’s not all free speech cases (though that’s what people tend to bring up when defending them, as shown here).
It may make some feel good to pretend that opposing the ACLU = opposing the Constitution, but it’s really not that simple.
The first part is true; the second is foolishness.
But at least one of the founders (and its first executive director) of the ACLU was a Communist.
Cite. To be fair, he later denounced the USSR, although not socialism.
The ACLU has a different view of civil rights than I do, so I don’t generally support them. Their view of the Second Amendment was one that basically stripped it of any meaning. The ACLU is automatically and unhesitatingly pro-abortion (cite, cite,).
It is mostly a left-wing pressure group, except on free speech issues.
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t say I “dislike” them but I do not agree on principle that there should be anything remotely related to percentages of white, latinos, black , asians, etc for any particular company position. If you are the most qualified person for the job, goodie for you. The color of your skin or the heritage behind it should have NO basis upon determining hiring practices.
is there a conservative version of the ACLU or is that like saying “is there a yellow version of corn” ?
Unfortunately, when it’s mostly white guys doing the hiring, they manage to find that other white guys (the ones they can best relate to) are usually–quite magically and coincidentally–disproportionately “most qualified”. How convenient!
I don’t want to sidetrack this into an AA debate, but it’s awfully glib to respond that somehow such decisions are unambiguously objective, when institutional bias continues to exist (quite invisibly) at times that make “fair” situations from one perspective seem equally unfair to the other.
Well, there’s Washington Legal Foundation.
Because they don’t defend the liberty defined by the second amendment.
So a very short-lived society then, without any method of reproduction. 
Too true! If only there was some organization out there that dedicated itself to defending this poor, vulnerable, overlooked amendment…
Actually, it’s only half of that amendment that they give a rip about.
I don’t particularly care if they actively work for the right or not, but I hate that an organization nominally devoted to civil liberties make hypocrites of themselves on this issue so as not to hurt their bottom line.
The ACLU does some great work (I have donated in the past). Their work on the behalf of freedom of speech, on behalf of search & seizure type laws is great and needed.
However, sometimes their targets (while justifiable) tend to hurt their image. They sue the Boys Scouts, the Girl Scouts, they attack decades old memorials that have Christian symbols, they go against the Nativity scene at the local park, they tell the school not to sing Christmas carols.
ALL of these I understand - but you ARE going to make some enemies doing this. It doesn’t help that they rarely fight for conservative plaintiffs. When I worked for a conservative newspaper in college, we contacted the local ACLU office for some help with the University. They had no desire to help us. Now, that was probably just one person who answered the phone - but the incident stuck with several of us.
The ACLUs stance on the 2nd Amendment does not help either. They seem to pick and choose which “people” they want to protect. Did they come down on the side of the Kelo people, or on the side of the government?
I don’t hate the ACLU - I consider them to be the equivalent of our Soviet allies in WWII. We need their help, we can support them, but we need to remember that there are times when we will be in conflict.
The Pacific Legal Foundation is another group that tries to fight for people that the ACLU tends to ignore:
But that’s what is so great about them. They have the guts to take on cases that they know will be controversial. In the end, the court will rule. If the court rules for their position it’s because they were “correct” by definition. I’d hate to live in a world where it’s OK for “cute” organizations that discrimionate.
Sometimes the ACLU fights to prevent torture, defend free speech, and ensure that accused criminals get a fair trial. I support all of this. Other times the ACLU fights to impost censorship, support intrusive government, and punish innocent people. I oppose all this.
In the first category, for instance, are their legal struggles to expose America’s torture campaign at Guatanamo Bay, to have Guatanamo inmates granted trials in court, and to let civil rights groups organize and march in public. All of this is in the Constitution. (8th, 5th, and 1st amendments respectively.)
In the second category would be having the government forcibly silence a student because she’s a Christian, using the government to forcibly knock down a privately built war memorial, demanding federal censorship of county seals, and fighting tooth and nail to prevent poor children from getting a decent education. None of this is in the Constitution. The ACLU constantly claims that the first amendment prevents government money from being used for any religious purpose. The First Amendment says no such thing, nor does any other part of the Constitution. That interpretation was made up by judges in the last few years. The ACLU and other opponents of free speech cling desperately to the judicial rulings because they know that there’s no way any democratically chosen government would ever choose to impose such censorship in the United States. The case of school vouchers is of particular concern to me because I believe that the quality of a kid’s education largely determines the quality of their life in some cases. Poor black and Hispanic kids in particular mostly get horrible education in America’s public schools. The ACLU will fight tooth and nail to deny them access to our vastly superior private schools, even when it could save the government money. I can’t talk about the national organization, but my Dad’s branch of the ACLU in Kentucky is 100% white, so I basically see rich white people fighting to deny poor minorities a decent education. Or, in other words, trying to restore Jim Crow.
So in short I like it when the ACLU supports freedom and dislike it when the ACLU opposes freedom.
Said organization would not exist in the form it does today if the ACLU had not taken the position that it has and aligned itself with the policy statements of the Democratic Party. The ACLU had ample opportunity to step up to the plate and defend it as a part of the Bill of Rights as vigorously as it defends the other amendments, but it chose not to for apparent political reasons. It wasn’t until 1975 that the NRA became politically active.
The ACLU also suffers from a bit of an image problem at times. They support cases that defend people who are widely seen as scumbags. While they may be on the right side of things, that doesn’t change the fact that the results in cases like Texas v. Johnson were widely unpopular. It’s the perception, not the reality, that matters when talking about image.
I have a few issues with the ACLU from time to time, but I generally don’t have any problem with what they stand for.
Exactly–first, the controversial cases are the important ones. Nobody has a problem defending civil rights when, by doing so, you further a moral good (say, protecting the innocent from unconstitutional searches)–the issue is much harder, and the right more important, when our moral instinct is to trample on the right (banning hate speech, protecting those who probably did it from unconstitutional searches and seizures). I admire the ACLU because they’re willing to stand for rights on principle–even when I, and every other reasonable person thinks that the exercise of the right is a moral wrong.
Also, I feel that the ACLU’s stance best protects my civil rights–and support it for that reason. As you say, it gets the question of who is exercising their rights out of the picture. I would argue that my rights (and I would suggest, all of yours) are better protected by the principle that rights are always protected, no matter what, than by any weaker principle. So I admire the ACLU’s stance specifically because defending civil rights on principle, and refusing to make an exception even in extreme cases, is the best way of ensuring that my rights will be respected in ordinary, or mundane cases.