Peakah's Provocations...

Just so I know where you're coming from friend...are you truly against an organization that helps fight for the equal protection, privacy and rights of people of color (i.e. my husband) lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people, women (i.e your wife and daugher), mental-health patients (myself) prisoners, people with disabilities and the poor (myself and my family in the past)? Religion is also protected under this.

Do you not believe that, for example, women, deserve the right to rise up to the status of the white male?

Do you not believe that racism and denying the rights of women and those of other religious beliefs/culture was and is wrong?

Could you have not easily been born a Hindi woman or a gay black? Would you think the same way?

I know my husband. being half-black, appreciates the fact that others are defending his rights. He deserves them, though he is still brought down because of his color, yet he is human. We all are. Every person deserves equal opportunities and safety in our individuality. It is noones fault what their genetics have dealt us or the religion/God they were brought up to follow.

I am of course saying this in belief that you think the ACLU truly is evil. I may be wrong, and if so I feel like an ass for going nuts with this reply. I'd like to hear your opinions.

The assumption that the ACLU is the be all and end all of civil rights is ignorant.

I'd hate to break it to you but the ACLU was not the organization who initially headed the defense of minorities in this country.

It's an organization created by a Communist named Roger Baldwin who sought to recreate America in the Soviet image and who jumped on bandwagons with the sole purpose to make America look bad in the public eye.

The fact that they in the past have defended minorities does not give you ammo to acertain that I'm against all the rights and privledges you've enumerated in your response. The fact is that law abiding spiritually minded citizens have taken up these fights and suceeded without the help of the ACLU. The ACLU somehow assumes credit for these progresses and college professors continue to promogulate these inaccuracies.

Consider the ACLU now:

Fights to have Gays lead boy scout troops. The boy scouts as a private organization has the right to keep gays from leading young boys.

Defends NAMBLA (North America Man Boy Love Association) saying that their online manual on how to gain the trust of small boys, how to justify molesting them, and what to say to law enforcement officials catching them in the act, all justified as "free speech".

They use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate 'civil rights'.

Their goal is to get control of the schools (they've suceeded in gaining control of college professorships obviously) and use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. They soften the curriculum by watering down our history (or insuring that it's not taught at all) and teaching the party line instead.

They've attempted to eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them 'censorship' and a violation of free speech and free press.

They break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.

They've sucessfully eliminated prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principals of 'seperation of church and state'. Ironic isn't it that prayer isn't covered under "free speech"?

They've supported any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture- education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics and the like.

They've discredited the family as an institution and encouraged promiscuity and easy divorce.

They are also leading the fight to have crosses broken off of our war memorials and beautiful monuments of the Ten Commandments ripped from our court houses. Hmm, which of those commandments offends them so? So much for the defense of free speech eh?

James Madison, known as the "Father of the Constitution" recognized that the very fact that we live in a free land which will inevitability give rise to organizations (such as the ACLU) whose sole purpose is to destroy that democracy that gave it life;

"...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

I see the concept and experiment of America as on the precipice of that democratic death as foretold by James Madison. The ACLU seems to be one of the armies leading the charge to this destiny. Therefore it is an enemy of the state.

I've yet to go into how the ACLU could be brought up on RICO statues in the way that it makes its profits off of tax payer dollars in the courtroom making it its own 4th branch of government that is unelected and unaccountable to the American voter. Don't confuse the rhetoric that the ACLU uses to justify its existance with what it actually spends its time and energy doing.

Has the ACLU done good things, yes... they have to in order to justify their existance. There have been issues that I back them on.

Are they an organization needed to protect the rights of minorities however you define them? No, they are not. The American public is able to take care of that themselves by utilizing the freedom and free speech we have on our own and by organizing our own movements. Slavery was not ended in this country by the ACLU althought the ACLU would like to have you believe that without their existance we'd slip back into that horrible period of our history. This is just silly.

You've yet to convince me that the ACLU (American Communist Liberties Union) is NOT an enemy of the state.

ACLU caught red handed

One story amongst hundreds that the ACLU is duplicitious and hipocritical in it's defense of 'free speech' or 'free expression'.

Wow. I am such a product of what professors have fed me. Thank you for the further education. I get so heated with the rights of women/gays/religious rights and especially race, but I don't always know what I'm talking about. I truly spaz out for some reason. Nothing personal. I'm glad to hear how others feel on these issues and very glad to learn something new about them. This is really more of my husbands field...politics and history. I should have asked him about this stuff first! The NAMBLA support and promotion of porn is shocking and is something I must look into more.

Thanks and hope I haven't ticked you off, Josh. :)