The ACLU Liberal seems to be in decline.

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Sat Sep 15, 2012, 01:12 PM - Edit history (1)

I would suggest that the ACLU has not changed, but that increasingly bitter partisanship has made their utterly principled approach less attractive because it cannot, by its nature, yield reliably partisan results.

To an ACLU Liberal there is an ineluctable logic to even the unpopular stances. Even Citizens United was not really optional for the ACLU, through the narrow and particular lens of political expressive rights that is their self-mandate, though a much, much closer call than most.

But in a case like Citizens United with very close competing principles and equities one can strike an internal ethical balance in favor of some level of regulation of campaigns without doing fatal violence to our structure of rights.

Wherever the line is, something will be teetering right on the line. I would guess that about half of ACLU liberals understand the Citizens United stance, while disagreeing with it.

The ACLU's view may be wrong in an extraordinarily close call but it is never, or certainly almost never since never is a long time, stupid, thoughtless or contemptible. The ACLU liberal is free to agree to disagree, but while understanding the ACLU position within the framework of ACLU's mission.

But the ACLU liberal cannot, because of her over-arching set of beliefs, entertain legal notions like restraint of political and religious speech and artworks (excluding child pornography as very narrowly defined) for the harm such speech might do. Unlike Citizens United, there is no tension in the principles involved in 99% of free speech cases. The tension comes only from emotional responses and frustrations.

Everyone has such passions and an unemotional framework of rights is a bulwark against our nature. We will, under sufficient provocation, feel like trampling somebody's rights. That human frailty is the starting assumption of our framework of rights.

We ACLU liberals do sometimes suffer emotionally for our convictions because principles, any principles, will inevitably sometimes diverge from what feels right.

But to view expressive freedoms in terms of what someone plans to say is the same as viewing voting rights in terms of how people plan to vote. If black voters were strong for Romney it would not, and could not, change how I think about voter suppression because I have subsumed all emotional views of voting to a principle that is larger than myself... external to myself in the way 2+2=4 is external to myself. Every adult citizen gets to vote. Period.

And if people are free to vote for billionaires to rob the nation then they are free to say any damn fool thing they want, outside a tiny number of incredibly narrow and non-expandable exceptions. Voting wrong is an expressive action with sometimes tragic consequences, yet we allow it.

[cthulu2016]

1. .

[TheKentuckian]

2. The ACLU did its job with CU, it is the court that failed to do its and maintain a balance that

can function in reality and it failed because the failing outcome has been a long term ideological objective.

Charter law became too expansive, the silly idea of corporate personhood, and money in politics have been fucked for many decades.

We need to reboot on most of this stuff and I don't know how we can because of the globalism.

How we got away from granting charters based on public good for limited functions and so requiring limited rights of "personhood" to the mission of the group of individuals acting in concert for the public good be it labor union, a for profit company, a website, an advocacy organization, a club, or whatever it is that brings people together for common purpose. Each should be granted rights specifically enumerated to allow service to the community and not a bit more.

The right believes in monetary aristocracy and strongly in might makes right, as well. A court is responsible for not annihilating the functioning right of individuals by directly converting ca$h to speech. The ACLU is a narrow focus (though a vitally important one), the court has to serve the biggest picture.

Everyone has to be honest and admit how complicated this is in reality in present legal context. There is no difference between a film company, a widget maker, a union, Greenpeace, or a political organization in this country. Money is all up in politics. It requires money to have a platform to be heard. Companies have no responsibility to the community, only to shareholders. Companies have no mission specific limits on activities.

We can't fix our issues from the status quo, not even the pre-CU status quo. Even if elections were 100% publicly financed we'd still have crazy influence of concentrated wealth that can push views that regular folks can't and the lobbying, manipulating those elected and the voters without directly pushing a candidate.
Who knows what strings have been pulled by the wealthy by nuancing movies, books, and TV shows in certain areas. Hell, even the news.