The Many Meanings of ACLU

           The American Civil Liberties Union portrays itself as so selflessly interested in civil rights that it defends the most unpopular groups, Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, etc. Under the façade of liberty for all the ACLU is selective about whose liberties it defends and is opposed to the civil rights of others.

             The ACLU defends Nazis, sodomites, pornographers, and prostitutes, narcotics abusers, but it opposes religious expression in public places as well as pro-life activists and home schoolers. They defended the rights of a ten year old girl to an abortion but not the right of a teenager not to return to Communist Russia. The girl was judged sufficiently mature to make a judgment without parental consent, but the teenage boy was not sufficiently mature to judge that he wanted to avoid living in a totalitarian state. Inconsistent? Not really. The ACLU likes abortion and because of the collectivist mentality inherited from its founder also liked the Soviet Union. They opposed police brutality toward a black person but ignored completely evidence of Los Angeles police brutality against pro-life activists. It asserted that we have a right to the John Birch Society’s membership list, but not to the list of the ACLU. In these cases ACLU means Advancing Contradictory Lines Unashamedly.

             In line with its liberal ideology it opposes all restrictions on every form of sex expression, male and female prostitution, contraception, adultery, homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia. Seemingly the ACLU considers the last perversion as a private matter between the perpetrator and the corpse. It wants to legalize all pornography including kiddie porn. It wants public libraries to present all materials to children including pornography. It opposes compulsory AIDS contact testing. Let the sexual partner beware. The ACLU is defending NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) a group, according to a lawsuit against it, “that exists to train pedophiles to rape children.” The ACLU, so-called guardian of free speech, is seeking a gag order to keep the case against NAMBLA out of the press. In this case ACLU stands for Association for Coarsening Life Utterly or Always Chasing Lustful Unions.

             The ACLU’s pet project is abortion. It wants abortion legal until birth with no parental interference in the case of abortions for minors and absolutely no ban on partial birth abortion. All abortions should be tax-funded. It wants to compel even Catholic institutions to perform abortions if they receive tax funds. The self-styled guardians of civil liberties care little about religious liberty of Catholics. They maintain that anyone who sponsors the idea that human life begins at conception is sponsoring a religious teaching. It never occurs to them that the notion that human life begins at birth is also a religious teaching that they are trying to impose on others. You are free to have religious convictions as long as they are those of the ACLU. A woman carrying a fetus about to be born was struck by a drunken driver and her baby was killed. Incredibly the ACLU defended the drunk and argued that no one was injured. The Court agreed and the woman received nothing in compensation. When aborted fetuses, some of them weighing four pounds, were found in a storage container behind a California pathologist’s house, local pro-lifers wanted to arrange a funeral for them. The ACLU and others filed suit to prevent the burial because the babies were only “unwanted biological tissue” and the burial would “violate the separation of Church and State.” The self-appointed defenders of rights give no rights to unborn human beings, to opponents of abortion even in the free exercise of their religion. In these cases ACLU stands for American Coalition for Liquidating the Unborn.

             The ACLU is determined to obliterate all vestiges of religion from public places allegedly on the basis of the Constitution. Philip Hamburger has written a meticulous study showing that (a) there was no concept of “separation” attached to the clauses on religion in the Constitution and (b) the Founding Fathers understood “separation” differently from the liberal interpretation of separation in our day. The First Amendment language, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” meant that Congress would not interfere with the establishments of religion in the states. Thus the Congregational Church in Connecticut was supported by law and by public funds with no complaint by anyone that this was unconstitutional. The present meaning of “separation” arose in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of anti-Catholic animus. The purpose was to deny public funds to sectarian (read: Catholic) schools. A more radical movement for separation came with the National Liberal League, which like present-day liberals sought to deny all aid, direct or indirect, to religious institutions or teachings.

             In the Everson case in which the Court sustained a program in New Jersey that paid for the busing of children to school, even parochial schools, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions….” Justice Black seemed to be making a concession to Catholics in allowing busing assistance since the aid was given to parents rather than the religious school, but this language of his grafted onto the decision became a new legal orthodoxy unattached to anything in the Constitution. The busing concession given was soon retracted by other Justices who deemed that even indirect tax aid to religious schools violated the principle. The original benefit was removed but the new legal doctrine that taxes should in no way benefit religion remained. The ACLU employs this principle found nowhere in the Constitution to drive religion into the private sphere, to treat it, as Justice Scalia says, on the same plane as pornography. The ACLU founder said that the Constitution is only “a parchment barrier” to government misdeeds. If liberal Justices can substitute their legal doctrine for the Constitution it is not even a parchment barrier protecting our rights. In its zeal to outlaw Christmas displays, prayer at athletic games, posting the Ten Commandments, eliminating chaplains for Congress and the military, striking the words “under God” from the pledge of allegiance ACLU means American Constitutional Law Undermined.

             So we see that the ACLU is not a guardian of persons whose civil rights are threatened but a liberal pressure group that uses the courts to impose its world view on society. It uses the courts because it has been singularly unsuccessful in pushing its agenda through legislatures. Liberal judges legislating from the bench are compliant allies issuing decisions unjustified by the Constitution. Here ACLU stands for Advancement of Corrosive Laws Unlimited.

            Suppose the ACLU would get all it wants. What kind of society would we have? The ACLU feels that it would be one in which free people could breathe freely. It would actually be one in which there would be rampant sexual immorality, sexual abuse of children, lives ruined by dope addiction because abusing narcotics would be legal, promotion of abortion at public expense, in short, all things that research shows ruin families and therefore society. The air we would breathe would have the fetid smell of death. ACLU ultimately stands for Association for Corrupting the Land Utterly.

(Printed November, 2002)