On the occasion of a new documentary about Ira Glasser, the former Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who retired in 2001, James Kirchick at Tablet looks at the way the organisation has transformed itself from a principled defender of free speech and the First Amendment into a self-consciously progressive group that embraces all the current aspects of woke ideology:
Think of the American Civil Liberties Union during the last two decades of the 20th century, and a certain type of person invariably comes to mind: shrewd, thick-skinned, and possessed of an unwavering—some might say irritating—commitment to principle. The men and women of the ACLU were liberals in the most honorable, but increasingly obsolescent, meaning of the term. They understood that the measure of democracy lies in the impartial application of its laws, and were prepared to defend anyone whose constitutional rights were trampled upon, irrespective of their political views or the repercussions that mounting such a defense might entail.
The archetypical ACLU figure was also often Jewish, as immortalized in the 2003 Onion story, “ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters.” That joke was based upon the real-life case of National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, wherein the organization represented a group of neo-Nazis who were denied a permit to march through a Chicago suburb that was home to a significant number of Jewish Holocaust survivors. The image of Jewish ACLU attorneys defending the free speech rights of American neo-Nazis was a source of shame for some Jews but pride for many others, a testament to Jewish confidence in the institutions and values of American liberalism. No American minority had reaped more from its faith in the country’s professed commitment to pluralism and tolerance than the Jews, a gift they repaid many times over by supporting the institutions—the universities, the Democratic Party, the ACLU—which upheld them. [...]
If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff attorney named Chase Strangio. Named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time magazine last year, Strangio is the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,” Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an ACLU employee to endorse. Strangio later deleted the tweet, explaining that his intention was not to call for the government to ban Shrier’s book, but rather “to create the information climate for the market to be more supportive of trans self-determination than the alternative.”
Strangio is of course perfectly entitled to his views about the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school sports, and to advocate for an “information climate” suppressing books he doesn’t like. What’s puzzling is why someone with such pro-censorship inclinations would want to work, of all places, at the American Civil Liberties Union. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s like a carnivore joining the staff of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Puzzling, that is, until you realize that—like so many other institutions whose worthy missions we naively assumed to be inviolable—the ACLU is no longer itself. The organization known as the ACLU is now led by people beholden to an ideology purporting that the essential function of the Constitution has been to serve as a blueprint for white supremacy, and that its broad free-speech protections are not a tool of emancipation for society’s underdogs but rather the handmaiden of their oppression.
To get an idea of where they are now, the ACLU's latest effort is to complain that Arkansas has "become the first state to ban health care for trans youth". What Arkansas has actually done, in fact, is to stop Arkansas youth from undergoing gender reassignment surgery or hormone supplements until they're 18 by passing the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act - an entirely praiseworthy move, taking a cue perhaps from the Keira Bell case here last autumn. So the ACLU are, basically, lying.
From the Glinner Update:
It's a sad decline.
Comments