Taking Liberties with the ACLU

...These reflections are prompted by the organization's "Work-plan for 1994," sent out to members last spring with a cover letter from Ira Glasser, the executive director since 1978...

...They have, however, widespread public support that extends well beyond the religious Right, and it is not very plausible to claim, as the ACLU does, that they are "all aimed at eroding women's reproductive rights...

...A second area where the ACLU might usefully reconsider its position is in its dogged support for the discriminatory forms of affirmative action?goals," set-asides, preferences based on race and sex...

...Colleges and universities are gagging students with rules against 'hate speech.'" Given the ACLU's other commitments, that is a brave statement...

...There was one national organization that could be counted on to resist these trends, often effectively...

...To advance their mission, this Right-wing axis of ersatz preachers and politicians has established ACLU-like clones to oppose us in courts all over the land...

...Thanks to the Supreme Court, the United States has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the world...

...The ACLU remains the only national organization devoted to the protection of civil liberties and continues to operate in a climate where few politicians of any stripe care much about them...

...Since 1975 the ACLU has had its ups and downs...

...During Ronald Reagan's Administration, though, despite Attorney General Edwin Meese's ludicrous description of it as a criminals' lobby, the ACLU made up much of the ground it had lost...

...Founded in 1917 to defend antiwar dissenters, the ACLU had over the years taken cases from every point on the political spectrum, from protesting the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to defending William F. Buckley Jr.'s right to speak at New York City's Hunter College to standing up for ex-Communists pilloried by the House Committee on Un-American Activities...

...Whether that change was good or bad depends on your perspective, but it was signaled by a broadening of the ACLU's agenda and a drastic heightening of its rhetoric...

...To its executive director, people who oppose any of the organization's major positions are bigots acting in bad faith...

...As Federal laws and courts continue to fail to protect reproductive rights," the Workplan states, "the ACLU is increasingly turning to state courts and constitutions" in order to fend off such restrictions as parental notification, 24-hour waiting periods, and requirements that women seeking abortion receive counseling about alternatives...

...This demonizing of the enemy is one of the least attractive features of recent ACLU documents...

...In fact the Workplan grudgingly but forthrightly continues: "In addition to the ongoing, undiminished attacks on speech and expression from the Right, we are seeing more and more challenges to freedom of expression from the other end of the political spectrum...

...To compensate for centuries of white entitlements, we do not enforce the democratic principles that those entitlements violated...

...An ACLU that supports racial gerrymandering of Congressional districts, attacks single-sex colleges for men but defends them for women, and demands a new war on poverty whenever people complain about crime is forgetting the difference between civil liberties and the social agenda of the Left...

...The aluminum membership card I got in return was built to last and maybe even stop a bullet...

...In pursuing its various causes, today's ACLU faces not simply opposition but "a virulent strain of Right-wing activism...

...Radicals who claim that concern for individual freedom is an old conservative superstition are paying conservatism an undeserved compliment...

...New threats pour forth each day...

...Whether they have anything to do with its financial difficulties is impossible to know without conducting a survey of people who reduced their contributions...

...Use of the CIA and FBI to control political dissent had been all too frequently rationalized in recent decades by the needs of the Cold War...

...A wide range of actions by two Republican administrations was annually denounced as the gravest threat to civil liberties in recent American history...

...Along with that substantive blurring of priorities comes the shrill rhetoric I mentioned earlier...

...According to a recent report by Judy Woodruff of CNN, the Internal Revenue Service now employs black women at a rate 15 times their proportion in the civilian work force...

...In turn, the ACLU came to be widely considered—and to some extent became in fact—an organization of the political Left rather than an impartial defender of individual rights...

...They seek to divide Americans one from the other and to scapegoat some for the problems faced by all...

...The early '70s brought it to a peak of membership because it made the Nixon Administration's threats to civil liberties the focus of a crusade...

...I can't overstate the breadth of this crisis or the urgency with which we must respond to it...

...Whether under Republican or Democratic administrations, individual liberty seemed far down the agenda of the Federal government, well below winning in Vietnam, keeping J. Edgar Hoover cheerful, or holding Alabama in the next election...

...It was neither Democratic nor Republican, conservative nor liberal, except in the historical sense that liberalism identifies liberty as the highest political goal...

...Since the 1940s it had worked energetically for civil rights for blacks...

...He distorts and exaggerates the claim of oppression that group entitlements have made the centerpiece of young black identity...

...Something has gone badly wrong...

...First, the organization is obsessed with abortion, although it uses the word as little as possible...

...Some feminist activists have closed down art exhibits they feel are degrading to women...

...Nobody who has worked in a university, the Federal government or a large corporation during the last two decades can be unaware of those contradictions, or of the destructive effects that an explicit but undiscussable system of group preferences has on everybody concerned...

...The language of plot and conspiracy has become pervasive since the ACLU first began to warn darkly about the religious Right, the enemy who is everywhere...

...Apart from the civil liberties of individuals, it had no agenda...

...That brave action brought mixed publicity and a drop in membership...

...Its future would be brighter, and so would the future of liberty in this country...

...Beyond denouncing quotas now and then, the Reagan and George Bush administrations did nothing about the situation, and it has gotten worse under Bill Clinton...

...As I write," the letter begins, "we find ourselves engaged in an increasingly fierce struggle with the extreme Right, led by the religious Right, all across the heartland of America...

...It may be a schizophrenic mess these days, but it's all we've got...

...Yet like previous statements stretching back over many years, the Workplan advocates a range of "diversity" programs and obscures the contradictions between such programs and the equal treatment of individuals...

...As Shelby Steele, a distinguished black liberal, pointed out recently in the New York Times, "For 25 years, the American formula for social reform has been based on the old formula for white supremacy...

...What is more, the evil empire disguises itself as—you'll never guess—the ACLU...

...Throughout the country, from the heartland to the national headlines, a dangerous, broad-based movement has surfaced to stop people from saying words some don't want to hear and to prevent depictions of images that some deem harmful to see...

...Whether those forms of regulation are a good idea in a country where over 1.5 million abortions are performed every year is open to reasonable debate...

...The use of intolerant, paranoid terminology in a document that claims to advocate "the principle of diversity" in speech and religion would be comical if the organization espousing it were less important...

...Its abortion branch, called the Reproductive Freedom Project, undertakes mountains of litigation and lobbying...

...The ACLU still does good work for civil liberties, which is why I'm still a member...

...Freedom of speech and expression" remains the first heading in the Workplan...

...Like many feminist groups, the ACLU perversely insists that the Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, reaffirming the right to abortion subject to minor state regulation, was a defeat...

...In 1975 Watergate was a recent memory...

...All of these practices flatly contradict the organization's traditional refusal to let group identifications or desirable social ends excuse violations of individual liberty and equal treatment...

...Now there's a civil-liberties issue...

...Second Thoughts TAKING LIBERTIES WITH THE ACLU BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN WHEN THE WORLD and I were somewhat younger, I decided one day to fork over a thousand dollars (roughly a year's savings) and become a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Praising the change of administrations in Washington, Glasser nonetheless finds the national situation worse than ever and complains that "the ACLU is barely managing to survive under the burden of such a relentless and broadbased assault on fundamental rights...

...If only it would again become an organization that libertarians from all points of the political compass could support, an organization with a single agenda...

...Italics in original...

...Glasser doesn't speculate why the Right should be flush and the ACLU broke more than a year into the Clinton Administration, but a friendly critic—say, a slightly disgruntled life member—might identify three problems with the organization's policies and self-presentation of late...

...One of the famous downs was its defense in 1978 of the right of a group of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois...

...It also changed its character...

...instead, we grant precisely the same undemocratic entitlement to minorities and women in the name of redress...

...This battlefield is one on which the ACLU could profitably declare victory...

...This explains the odd attraction of middle-class black students to the likes of Louis Farrakhan, who now commands $ 15,000 to $20,000 per lecture...

...Steele's plea, in line with the old ACLU but not the new, is for "a democracy of individuals that has the discipline never to entitle any group for any reason...

...It even denounces Attorney General Janet Reno's threats to censor violent television programming, comparing them with the aims of Senator Jesse Helms...

...That sentence could be improved by changing "a movement" to "movements," indicating that threats to the First Amendment come from several directions at once, but basically it's true...

...Something, not everything...

...There are others, but let's not overdo it...

...Such opponents as Pat Robertson and Patrick Buchanan "are conspiring effectively to confuse Americans about basic values like free speech and religious liberty...

...Net contributions, it seems, were down by 13 per cent in 1993, while "Right-wing organizations are reporting soaring membership and record contributions...