The champions of free speech Posted by: McQ
on Friday, January 21, 2005
Apparently free speech is for everyone else but those who are on the ACLU's board.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that the Consitutional guarantee of free speech means that the government can't interfere with your speech rights (and nothing else) but I find it a bit ironic that the organization which has essentially taken every opportunity to ignore that point when it argues for free speech is in the middle of attempting to suppress a couple of its board members who have spoken out.
The executive committee of the A.C.L.U. board will discuss whether Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers have acted inappropriately as board members. The two have criticized some actions by the executive director, Anthony D. Romero, and the executive committee for what they said was a failure to provide proper oversight.
Apparently Kaminer and Meyers have violated some sort of code of conduct by their outspoken criticism of actions by executive director Romero.
In a Dec. 28 letter, Catherine S. Travis, a lawyer who sits on the board of the A.C.L.U. affiliate in Oregon, recommended that the board consider suspending or removing Mr. Meyers and Ms. Kaminer, saying that they had violated their fiduciary responsibilities by talking to reporters about matters she called confidential.
"Appropriate corrective action must be taken now to avoid further incidents that can only impede the organization's ability to meet the unprecedented challenges to civil liberties we face at this critical juncture," Ms. Travis wrote
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Fiduciary responsiblities? So what have the pair of dissidents done?
Ms. Kaminer and Mr. Meyers began pressing for more information about certain practices last summer. Their pressure led to the disclosure that the organization had signed an agreement that obliged it to check its employees' names against government terrorist watch lists, the type of lists it has decried. They also discovered that Mr. Romero advised the Ford Foundation, his former employer, to use the language of the USA Patriot Act, which the organization is fighting, in its grant agreements.
Most recently, the dissident board members have criticized Mr. Romero's decision to do more extensive research on A.C.L.U. donors and members without fully informing the board what data would be obtained by whom. They say they were concerned that the organization is engaging in the same kind of research that it has contested as a violation of privacy when done by government agencies and corporations.
"They are going after the critics instead of the criticism, and I think that's a gross embarrassment and shameful for the A.C.L.U.," Ms. Kaminer said in an interview.
Mr. Meyers said any effort to punish or silence them would be a violation of the organization's commitment to free speech and the right to dissent. "I am a person who urges them and constantly reminds them that they must practice what they preach," he said, "and I am, therefore, their worst nightmare."
Sounds to me that when Kaminer and Meyers pointed out the hypocrisy of various actions by Romero, they were ignored, and then, acting as whistleblowers, they went to the press.
At a press conference held by prominent government whistleblowers, the American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it will provide legal counsel to federal employees who may want to come forward to expose government wrongdoing or cover-ups.
But apparently, if I read this article correctly, that protection only extends to government employees, not their own organization.
In her letter, Ms. Travis expressed concern that the dissidents' criticism was hurting the organization.
Ms. Travis said in a telephone interview that she had not intended for her letter to be circulated beyond the board and therefore declined to comment on it. "I find this disturbing, this focus on internal governance issues when the organization is doing such important work in the protection of our civil liberties at a crucial junction in our history," she said. "I'd like to see the media looking at that."
I'll bet she would. Internal governance issues and a couple of ACLU whistleblowers should be ignored and they should be silenced. With that out of the way, they could then again spend their time finding a protecting government employee whistleblowers who want to expose the "internal governance" of their particular department.
What the story doesn't mention is that the data mining the ACLU was doing on its own members and donors violated its own privacy policy. It wasn't a matter of the ACLU doing what they criticcized others for doing, though that's certainly part of it, but that they expressly violated their own black and white policy.
I'm telling you, there's a definite French Aristocracy thing going on among the liberals organizations these days.
As if they carried any credibility these days anyway.....with their two faced behavior in the real world, no surprise the chickens would eventually come home to roost within the organization.
"...the dissident board members have criticized Mr. Romero's decisionto do more extensive research on A.C.L.U. donors and members without fully informing the board what data would be obtained by whom."
I'm telling you, there's a definite French Aristocracy thing going on among the liberals organizations these days.
Very good characterization. Its this sort of hypocrisy which destroyed NOW. They remained silent when Clinton did his thing and now they have little if any credibiltiy when they do speak out.
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.
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 investigatory 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 said. "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.
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