The ACLU Muzzling Speech (Again)?

InstaPundit discusses a New York Times article stating that the ACLU is considering “new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal administration.”

As I pointed out here a year and a half ago, this is not so unusual for the ACLU.

UPDATE [25 May]

I’ve just copied a fascinating comment here that Han Bader recently posted on an older post. You should read it.

Say What? (4)

  1. Richard Nieporent May 24, 2006 at 6:13 pm | | Reply

    This would be funny if it weren’t so sad. It is not a matter of having to demonize the ACLU. They do an excellent job of doing that to themselves. If they actually believed in civil liberties, then even if you disagreed with some of their positions, you could at least respect them for being a defender of the constitution. However, that is not the case. They are total hypocrites when it comes to civil liberties. They only defend civil liberties for certain segments of the population. So, no, it is not surprising that this great defender of free speech would attempt to censor the speech of their own members.

  2. Anita May 25, 2006 at 10:04 am | | Reply

    The ACLU is not a group of hypocrites. They are just a group of liars. They have an agenda which has little to do with liberalism,and everything to do with promoting leftwingism. The ACLU knows what it is doing.

  3. John Rosenberg May 25, 2006 at 11:53 pm | | Reply

    Hans Bader recently posted the following comment to this post. Because of its

    relevance, I have taken the liberty of posting it as a comment here as well. It follows:

    The ACLU, self-proclaimed champion of free speech, doesn’t believe in free speech when it’s aimed at the ACLU itself, even though it believes that other private organizations should be compelled by law to tolerate dissent in their ranks or face a lawsuit.

    That is illustrated by a May 24, 2006 New York Times article discussing ACLU leader Romero’s attempt to silence ACLU board members who have criticized the ACLU’s recent willingness to support curbs on hate speech and anti-abortion speech.

    The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution only restrict the conduct of state actors. Private associations are thus free to condition membership on not publicly criticizing the association’s positions or leaders, and to require that members share a common religion or other characteristic (unless the characteristic is prohibited by an antidiscrimination statute that does not intrude too deeply on the association’s First Amendment freedom of association). This is called the “state action” doctrine. It greatly limits federal courts’ control over private institutions, promoting freedom of association and a free market economy.

    The ACLU, however, opposes the state action doctrine. It believes that private institutions, such as shopping centers and private colleges, should be subject to restrictions under the First Amendment, and that even the smallest businesses or associations should be subject to the Equal Protection Clause. For example, it argued in a Connecticut case that the Klan should be able to demonstrate in a private shopping center, overriding the property and free association rights of its owners, and recently persuaded the New Jersey courts to use the New Jersey State Constitution to force private housing developments and shopping centers to host political advocacy groups. Similarly, the ACLU argued that the boy scouts should not be able to dictate membership criteria, a position the U.S. Supreme Court rejected in 2000 on First Amendment freedom of association grounds. And it unsuccessfully urged the Oregon Supreme Court to hold that the owner of a small business violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, not just state law, by engaging in workplace religious proselytizing, in the 1995 Meltebeke case.

    However, there is one special private organization that the ACLU believes should be exempt from judicial oversight so that it can restrict its members’ speech: the ACLU itself. The ACLU’s leader, Anthony Romero, has apparently created files on dissident members of the ACLU’s national board, who have criticized the ACLU for failing to oppose restrictions on politically incorrect speech, like anti-abortion ads. And he is pushing to forbid board members from criticizing the ACLU’s board or its staff, arguing that such criticism makes “fund-raising” harder for the ACLU. This is a very ironic position for an organization that claims to be a champion of free speech to take.

    It is especially ironic given that the ACLU has repudiated far more limited speech restrictions it endorsed in the past. The ACLU continually depicts as a shameful cave-in to McCarthyism the ACLU’s own Post-World War II policy of excluding supporters of totalitarian movements from its board. That prohibition had the effect of excluding several communist ACLU board members who had backed Stalin’s dictatorship and previously supported the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. Apparently, the ACLU believes in free speech for totalitarians, but not for First Amendment advocates.

    Romero justifies the proposed speech restriction by pointing to a supposed need to balance “conflicting” rights. “Take hate speech,” he told the New York Times. “While believing in free speech, we do not believe in or condone speech that attacks minorities.”

    This is a frequent ACLU tactic, to argue that free speech is overridden by a competing “right” when the speech becomes inconvenient. The ACLU’s “balancing” is applied in an inconsistent and unprincipled manner, based on how much it sympathizes with the target of the speech.

    For example, the ACLU successfully argued that Nazis advocating genocide should be allowed to march through the town of Skokie, home to many Holocaust survivors, saying that the Nazis’ free speech rights outweighed the interests of the Holocaust survivors. And it later sued a private restaurant for refusing to serve neo-Nazis because they insisted on wearing swastikas while dining, trampling on the restaurant owners’ freedom of conscience and their private property rights.

    But in another case, Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car System, it filed an amicus brief supporting a state court’s gag order banning an employee from uttering even a single racial slur, based on racial harassment that was found to have occurred years earlier, even if no other employee ever heard the slur. The ACLU argued that such slurs could be banned because they were just “verbal acts” of “discrimination” against Hispanics, rather than “pure speech.” The state court accepted the “discrimination” rationale for restricting speech, even though federal courts have consistently held that a single slur does not constitute discriminatory harassment, either by itself or in conjunction with harassment that occurred long ago, and is irrelevant if other employees are not aware of it (and even though the employee accused of harassment was himself married to a Hispanic and the soccer coach of the very employees who accused him of harassment).

    “Balancing rights” enables the ACLU to skirt principle to reach whatever pre-ordained politically correct result it wants.

    Links to the cases discussed above can be found at the Open Market Blog at http://www.ceiopenmarket.org/openmarket/2006/05/what_free_speec.html.

  4. Hans Bader May 29, 2006 at 2:22 pm | | Reply

    To access the above link on the ACLU’s hypocrisy, go to the following web site:

    http://www.ceiopenmarket.org/openmarket/2006/05/what_free_speec.html

    I mistakenly included an extra period in the web site’s address when giving the link in my above comment. That made the link inoperable.

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