I am not a righty, or a whitey-tighty. I am, however, a born-again Christian, and the ACLU has a serious agenda against belief in the Bible and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Their court cases would strongly suggest it, but my conviction that this is true comes from a long time ago, when I supported them (as a child of 12) as defenders of the rights of everyone and the principle of equal protection under the law. Even though I witnessed the time of their cases against school prayer, I believed that they were protecting the Constitution, even if, I’d admit, a little too zealously against the “religious.” It was a matter of principal.
A particular case, I don’t remember the details, was being fought out in our local newspapers, including in their letters columns. I followed this, strongly supporting the ACLU position at first, and deploring the attitudes of their opponents. It didn’t hurt that the ACLU were the hip side, although it also made it more important that I examined my conscience for my true motives. Sometime into the battle, the conservative paper, in a column or a letter, I can’t remember which, published what they said was the original charter of the ACLU. In it, Baldwin (I assume) said something to the effect that they would use the establishment clause and the issue of freedom of speech of enemies of Biblical religion together, to marginalize it to the point that nobody who clung to belief would dare speak about it in public, and within a few years it would be eliminated from polite society altogether. I understood that people like Baldwin and his followers considered this a good thing, progress, and since I had seen Inherit the Wind, it was easy to imagine him and Mencken snickering over the fast one they’d played on the Christian boobacracy. Well, I had bent over backwards to support this “principled” group, but I realized I couldn’t support this, because trying to force the truth of God, and the Good News of Jesus Christ, which is not an oppressor, but the most important liberator, out if the world was really evil. And even though I almost always have supported their other cases, since this agenda seemed to be the one closest to their founder’s heart as well as the current guys, I’ve never been able to really support them since. It was as if I had seen through them a little too much. But, this is the thing: I can’t find that original charter anywhere. It is not online that I’ve been able to tell. If the one I’d read in the afternoon paper had been untrue, wouldn’t the liberal morning paper have protested so? Now, this was 47 years ago, and obviously I can’t clearly remember exactly what was said, yet I am sure of the gist of it, yet can’t prove it. So this is hearsay and can’t be anything else; I’d provide documentation if I could find it.
This I remember about that newspaper freedom of speech/establishment clause controversy, too: the “last word” was when a letter writer asked, “What about my right not to hear?” And for most letter writers, that seemed to say it all; at least no more letters about that particular controversy were published. Nuff said.
But, if the establishment clause, freedom of speech and the “right not to hear” were all on the anti-God side, the pro-God people had neither free speech (violates the “right not to hear”) but had no corresponding right not to hear, either. Had the ACLU, the newspaper’s editor and the ACLU-friendly letter writers noticed and cared about the inequity, I’d have been able to at least retain some respect for them, despite Baldwin’s nefarious intentions. But they just swept it under the rug, one for us and zero for the Christian boobacrats.
With no ACLU, there would be no one to defend many important rights cases. But with their consistently anti-Christ bias and their cynical ploy to deep six the witness of the Bible, I can’t support them. I wish I could, but what they seek to destroy is even more important than what they defend.
If they and their many allies on the left hadn’t seen it as great pragmatic-Yankee wisdom to drive out the Jesus believers, would there be a religious right today? I believe that the hypocritical right would have attracted a number of unsaved traditionalists, but the really believing wouldn’t have been inclined to stay if they’d once taken a look around and seen what they were being unequally-yoked with. Even today if you talk to genuine believers, they express a lot more doubt about the side they are supposed to be so one with. It is the ones who think they own the Christians who do most of the public talking, which is, of course, what Baldwin wanted. I have many times wanted the ease again of picking a side and sticking with it, but for me, God was more important than politics. Baldwin might as well have been Albert Pike for that.
