The ACLU’s Attack on Civil Liberties

The ACLU has decided to lend its legal talents to the defense of an aggressive form of “civil rights,” and this makes it hostile to traditional forms of civil liberties–especially the free exercise of religion.  I write about this in this article at Public Discourse.

Here is a key passage, in which I contend that

the ACLU is not in fact defending any neutral principles in its letter. Instead, it is trying to privilege certain points of view in the law and shelter them from criticism. In other words, it is standing not for equality but inequality.

This becomes clear if we consider the following questions. Suppose the ACLU accidentally hired some lawyers who opposed the ACLU’s legal and constitutional agenda. Would it accept a law that prohibited it from terminating those lawyers, even if they litigated—on their own time—on behalf of causes the ACLU disapproved? Would it tolerate a law that required the ACLU to make its offices available for meetings of these dissident attorneys? Certainly not. The ACLU is trying to deprive other organizations of freedoms that it would insist upon for itself. Its work is not a defense of equality—it is an effort to impose a certain view of morality on the country by law.