Save the ACLU?
Several former ACLU leaders, including former executive director Ira Glasser, have started Save the ACLU to:
restore its integrity, and its consistency of principle and remedy its failure to apply to itself core civil liberties principles that it insists everyone else observe. The failure to practice what we preach—until publicly embarrassed—has already done grievous injury to the ACLU and ultimately threatens its historic mission.
Sasha Volokh asks “Is there any overlap between what libertarians find problematic about the modern-day ACLU and the reform agenda of this group?” A quick glance through their archives indicates that the participants in Save the ACLU appear to be focusing on internal problems at the ACLU, mainly recent attempts by the ACLU to stifle dissent within their own ranks.
They are probably good reforms. I would argue, however, that they don’t address root causes. I think that a civil rights organization that is willing to argue that the right of the people is really a power of government will inevitably slide into arguing that they need to restrict freedom in order to save it.
As Save the ACLU says in their mission statement, “Our credibility and effectiveness depend upon our consistency of principle.”
- Save the ACLU
- “An ACLU compromised by its repeated failures to practice what it preaches will be unable to resist these attacks for long. Our credibility and effectiveness depend upon our consistency of principle.”
- “Save the ACLU” Campaign
- “A group of former American Civil Liberties Union officials, employees, and longtime supporters are caling for the ouster of the ACLU’s current leadership and a renewed focuson the organization’s founding principles.”
More ACLU
- ACLU attacks private citizen, ensures irrelevance
- The ACLU has a knack for finding just the right person to blame to ensure that their policies get lost.
- ACLU enables Texas textbook takeover
- If you give the government a gun, some politician or bureaucrat somewhere is going to pull the trigger. Make sure that whatever powers you cede to the government are powers you want them to exercise.
- Don’t wait—capitulate
- The ACLU’s doomed campaign against telecom immunity is a classic example of why you have to be willing to vote for Nobody if you want to be taken seriously in politics.
- ACLU supports the right to bear arms?
- Does the ACLU now support the right to own and carry weapons, or does it think that this power has been stripped from the military and police?
- ACLU Encourages Police State
- By arguing against a right of effective self-defense, and by encouraging people to rely on the police for their protection, the ACLU ensures that voters will clamor for a police state.
- One more page with the topic ACLU, and other related pages