All my life I’ve heard about the American Civil Liberties Union, those champions of our Constitutional rights, whose stated goal is to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person … by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” It sounds great; I wish it was true.
Most non-liberals will probably tell you that the ACLU is an ultra-liberal, anti-Christian, power-hungry group whose real goal is to force everyone in the USA to live like the ACLU wants us to live. I think there’s a very good reason to believe that this is not far from the truth. I don’t know why, but I just assumed that the ACLU started out with good, upstanding goals and over the years has morphed into the strange group that currently exists. I was quite surprised to find out that they started out as possibly even more extreme than they are today.
According to Wikipedia, my trusted source of information (it’s open-source, so it must be true!), the ACLU was formed in 1917, having its roots in an organization formed to protest US involvement in World War I, and provided legal aid to those being prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. A nobel beginning, indeed.
One of the ACLU’s most celebrated founders was Roger Nash Baldwin, who held both socialist and anarchist ideas. His marriage vows included the line, “the present institution of marriage among us is a grim mockery of essential freedom…” Sounds like a great start for a marriage. It’s no surprise, then, that the ACLU has recently defended polygamists, child pornographers, and other wonderful pillars of society.
Oh, here’s another quote by Baldwin:
“I am for Socialism, disarmament, and ultimately the abolishing of the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”
And he called the orgainzation the American Civil Liberties Union?
The ACLU today is really keen on the Separation of Church and State, which as we all know is not even in the Constitution (more on this another time). They have interpreted the “Separation of Church and State” to mean “we shall not mention God at all, in any public place.” You’d think, if this was what the founding fathers meant by, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” they wouldn’t have put “In God We Trust” on our money. But then, common sense is not a characteristic of the ACLU.
As with the church and state issue, the ACLU seems to specialize in warping and stretching the various amendments to fit their agenda, such as stretching the 4th Amendment to imply a “right to privacy,” then stretching that to include the right to an abortion. They may be wackos, but they are not to be “misunderestimated.”
As mentioned earlier, they currently support the right to be a pornographer, the right to be addicted to heroin, and the right to bigamy. They do, however, interpret the 2nd Amendment rather narrowly, saying it is “primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government,” a quote from the ACLU’s website. (So, apparently individuals can only be armed if they are in groups, fighting the Federal government.) Evidently, to the ACLU, not all Constitutional Rights are created equal.
I admit I was wrong in my perceptions of the ACLU. I had come to view them as liberal extremists; however, they may actually be anarchists just masquerading as liberals. Whatever their philosophy and motivation, it is clear that their goal is something other than protecting our Constitutional rights.
I hear that there is a new book out, called The ACLU vs. America. I haven’t read it, but it may be worth checking out.