The “Anti-Christian” Civil Liberties Union
Presented by Ed Brayton, Co-founder, Michigan Citizens for Science
About the Speaker
Ed Brayton is a businessman and co-founder of The Panda’s Thumb and Michigan Citizens for Science. He is a freelance writer for publications such as Skeptic, The Bard, and Reports of the National Center for Science Education. His blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars is featured on Scienceblogs.com.
About the Event
Summary with Commentary for the #249th meeting of CFI- Michigan, held on March 26, 2008.
Please note that there will be no CFI- Michigan meeting on the 9th of April; we will resume our normal second and fourth Wednesday meeting dates on April 23rd. In place of the April 9 meeting, we are co-sponsoring (with the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies) the Hitchens versus Hitchens debate at Fountain Street Church on April 3rd, starting at 7:30PM, where the Hitchens brothers- Christopher and Peter- will square off for the first time together on stage to debate everything from the Bible to the bomb. Tickets are still on sale for this major event. Contact Jennifer Beahan, Assistant Director of CFI- Michigan, for more information or on purchasing tickets. .
Jason Pittman will host the 1st part of a two part movie: The Four Horsemen (featuring Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, as they discuss, in an informal setting, religion and rationalism and the controversies engendered by their recent books that are critical of religion) on April 9, which would have been a regular meeting evening for us. The second part will be shown at his home on April 16.
The topic for this meeting was: The “Anti- Christian” Civil Liberties Union, presented by Ed Brayton, the co-founder of Michigan Citizens for Science and The Panda’s Thumb. He is a freelance writer who has contributed to such publications as The Bard, Skeptic, and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, among others. His blog: Dispatches from the Culture Wars, is featured in Scienceblogs.com. Brayton spoke to us previously on the Dover, PA Intelligent Design trial and its aftermath.
Brayton joked about the issues that arose when the title for his presentation was sent out. Civil libertarians and other staunch state- church separationists thought he really was attacking them, or characterizing them negatively; some from the ACLU wondered if he was truly labeling them as anti- Christian. Instead, his provocative title sardonically made use, with spurious intent, of one of the renditions formulated by enemies of the American Civil Liberties Union in order to demonize them. But he is solidly in the ACLU’s camp.
The Religious Right has waged a campaign to distort the history and positions of the ACLU as well as telling outright lies. Brayton quipped that it should actually cause physical pain to the prevaricator for the individual or group to make and spread such fabrications. But they have been fairly successful in their campaign; a mark of this success is that George Herbert Walker Bush was able to smear Michael Dukakis by simply calling the Democratic challenger a card- carrying member of the ACLU. We may also recall that he felt comfortable, and unconcerned about suffering any political or personal liability in making the remark that he was not sure that atheists could be patriots. He bolstered this declaration by repeating the tiresome canard that we are, after all, one nation under God.
The Religious Right seems incapable of making the distinction between defending the right of citizens of our nation to say awful things and agreement with those terrible views expressed. Some of the people defended by the ACLU are members of groups felt to be quite unsavory, but they still have the Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. This right is what the ACLU defends, not the positions expressed by those they defend, per se. What opponents of the work done by the ACLU fail to see is that they too have these same guarantees of rights and liberties that they decry in other unpopular groups and individuals. If one group or citizen is denied the protections afforded by the supreme law of the land, then they, too, may be vulnerable one day to having those same liberties removed from them. Defending the legal rights of one citizen or organization helps to ensure a strong defense of the rights for all citizens and groups.
Because the ACLU has been associated so closely with some of the groups and individuals they have defended, they have been labeled as terrorists, Communists and as the most dangerous organization in the world. The ACLU was officially established on January 20, 1920 as a direct result of the Palmer raids. Susan Jacoby wrote of this in her book The Age of American Unreason (pages 84-85: [...] more than six thousand Communists and Communist sympathizers had been rounded up and arrested in their homes and workplaces by the end of 1920. In a festive touch, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who called himself “the fighting Quaker,” launched a series of coordinated raids on Party offices on New Year’s Day, when the faithful comrades traditionally gathered to celebrate the holiday. Clarence Darrow, the nation’s best known defense lawyer, would later describe the period as “an era of tyranny, brutality, and despotism, that, for the time at least, undermined the foundations upon which our republic was laid.” End of quote.
The ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin (1884- 1981), fought for progressive causes and to ward off what he saw as the negative influence of right wing encroachment upon civil liberties for all citizens. He had an early concern for the treatment of wartime dissidents including the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies) and believed that their rights could be safeguarded by a well- intentioned group reaching out to top government officials. Some of the noteworthy early cases the ACLU was involved in included the ones of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys and John Scopes, the biology teacher who taught evolutionary principles in Dayton, Tennessee in direct violation of the laws then and there, resulting in the famous so-called Monkey Trial in 1925.
In his own time, Baldwin was both revered and despised, as was the organization he founded. The FBI maintained close scrutiny on the ACLU’s activities and many then, too, regarded the organization as dangerous. As with many stereotypes, there is a often a kernel of truth amid the sea of false and damaging negative propaganda. They were and are considered to be extremely liberal, and indeed the early ACLU actively recruited radicals and liberals in the US to the causes they defended, but these unified efforts were generally ones of fighting racism, fascism, and poverty. Baldwin was associated with many progressive and left-leaning groups, but these were ones that stood in defense of the rights of the disenfranchised and powerless. They were and are regarded as elitist and it is true that Baldwin was highly selective in garnering the best people to work in the organization— those imbued with good intentions, good minds and a never- wavering belief in the importance of our Constitutional guarantees. It was associated with Communists and Communist sympathizers. Baldwin wrote about and visited Soviet Russia and his organization defended Communists here in our country. At that time, there was a substantial number of people associated with the Party, including those on the periphery called fellow- travelers, and some 20% who considered themselves Socialists. We are supposed to have, in this country, a right to freedom of association and this was defended by the ACLU. Baldwin himself, however, was a staunch critic of Communism and even wrote a book called: A New Slavery, dealing with what the subtitle called: The Communist Betrayal of Human Rights.
As Brayton mentioned, oftentimes an organization is branded and identified by the actions of a member or a small minority of the membership of that organization, even if those actions are not representative of the organization itself. It is simply easier to broadbrush an entire organization negatively than to regard the actions of individuals. It is easier to harshly judge and condemn a larger group than to consider the merits of individual cases associated with the group in a fair manner. This was seen to be the situation in examples of cases that Brayton mentioned where the ACLU defended members of organizations who were acting on their own, not as representatives of those organizations.
The ACLU of Baldwin’s time was not composed of dittoheads. Some within his organization became overly friendly with totalitarian policies and organizations, prompting Baldwin to disallow such individuals from serving on the board. Another example of schisms within the organization involved the issue of the Japanese- American internment during the Second World War. In this case, Baldwin had to walk a tightrope where he strove to maintain a good relationship with the federal government while working toward protecting the civil rights of those whose rights were being infringed upon, as well as working with those within his own organization who held different views from his.
No matter who the ACLU has had for its client- no matter what group or individual, and no matter what ideology has been espoused by those served by them; it must be remembered that its true client is the Bill of Rights. So committed are they to defending the rights and maintaining the protections afforded to all citizens, no matter their orientation, beliefs, character of their speech, etc., that Jewish members of the organization have defended Nazis. And they have successfully defended the rights of those who have been their most staunch opponents and sharpest and most venomous opponents, including highly prominent individuals from the Religious Right. They may, as a collective body, vehemently disagree with the content of the speech of certain organizations and influential individuals, but they defend the right to speak out, as well as to assemble and to worship freely and all of the other Constitutional guarantees we are supposed to have as citizens of this country.
Because of the ACLU’s tireless efforts in maintaining the concepts in the Establishment Clause, they have been branded by the Christian Right as anti- Christian. Anti- Christian, for them, means that whenever their narrow belief system is not officially supported or endorsed by the federal government, their rights are being harmed. The Constitution was intentionally set up as a thoroughly secular document by the Framers to disallow one belief system to dominate others via federal support or establishment. This keeps government out of the business of religious institutions and stops it from impeding individual practices of matters of faith, and it keeps the nation from devolving into theocratic ruin from undue religious influence.
Brayton recounted several flat out lies that were propagated by Falwell, Robertson and others of their ilk; those whom Brayton humorously called Liars for Jesus. They would often tell of Christian activities that were defended by the ACLU (they left that part out, however) and end by saying that they were successful despite the ACLU’s efforts! Falwell himself had been defended by the ACLU in two separate court cases! The civil liberties organization has defended everything from getting a zoning permit through for the building of an African- American church to fighting for the rights of street preachers tin order for them to continue in their practice. They have defended the right to wear religious slogans on one’s personal clothing to defending the right to include Bible verses in school yearbooks. They will and have defended the rights of individuals and groups to express their religious convictions without suppression, but they, in keeping with the Constitutional mandates, do not support one religious group overwhelming or denying the rights of any other religious group or secular interests in the public sphere. They do not support or defend the use of the force of government to establish or support matters of faith, or to deny the free exercise of one’s faith. The Religious Right is not concerned with religion itself being forced on all people, but rather their own brand of religion. They do not advocate prayer mats for students in public schools to sit upon and face Mecca, or for recitation from the Qur’ran.
But many organizations have learned the lesson that to increase their success in fundraising efforts, they must misrepresent themselves as victims, and when the oppressor is demonized as being anti- Christian or anti-American, then so much the better. They need not let a little thing like inconvenient facts and the truth get in the way of a good fundraising campaign. A lot of times, when the Religious Right knows it does not have the law on its side or any basis upon which to expect a successful (for them) outcome in a trial, the strategy will be to hobble the opposition on the way into court—by slander or otherwise getting public opinion set against them. Brayton called this, with his characteristic wit, the Tanya Harding approach.
Brayton gave us an extensive list of pejorative interpretations from the Religious Right and other opponents of the ACLU on what the civil libertarian organization’s initials stand for. The A is associated with words like atheist and anti, as in anti-Christian; the C, with Communist or crazy, etc.; the L with liberal or lunatic, as examples; and the U with unit, etc. Of course many of those who stand in opposition to the ACLU’s work also share a disdain for the word union itself, especially regarding labor unions, so that in itself does not need to be altered in order for them to feel they are slandering the organization.
As with other movements, organizations, etc. who have demanded accountability from the current administration, or have sought answers to questions that have not been forthcoming, the ACLU has been considered unpatriotic and/or un-American when they do likewise. As to matters pertaining to the invasion and occupation of Iraq where transcripts from Tribunals have been sought (as they were, uncontroversially, for the Nuremberg trials),the ACLU is said to be aiding terrorism or having a preference for defeat. As if wanting to keep the laws of our land robust and our freedoms intact does anything to weaken us; and as if undermining our liberties, responsibility and lawfulness somehow keeps us safer and makes us stronger as a nation.
Brayton discussed the Jerry Falwell- founded ACLJ, which is, with Jay Sekulow as its lead attorney, the Religious Right’s answer to the ACLU. The ACLJ stands for American Center for Law and Justice. It’s website states that it engages in litigation, provides legal services, and supports attorneys who are involved in fighting the erosion of religious and civil liberties. But isn’t this what the ACLU does already? Should they not join forces? How can the ACLJ oppose the ACLU, if they are working toward the same goals? At the bottom, in smaller print, on their webpage- one sees that the: American Center for Law and Justice is a d/b/a for Christian Advocates Serving Evangelicals, Inc. They tout their victories and work in getting the Bible and prayer into public schools, defending the rights of the unborn (as they word it), anti- abortion litigation, and getting the Ten Commandments housed in public institutions among other issues. So it is not, in fact, advocacy for civil liberties or for our Constitution or established law, but for the agenda of the Religious Right that they engage in.
The ACLU is often characterized, Brayton told us, as being in it for the money. But as our presenter explained, they do not charge in cases where they lose. They are committed to the defense of our Constitutional rights and this is their passion and motivation. They do a lot of voluntary and pro bono work for cases that they believe in. There was no charge, for instance, for the Dover Intelligent Design trial work. The opposition, on the pro- ID side, was not nearly so generous.
Brayton discussed the current composition of the Supreme Court which has swung more to the right and with Kennedy, a conservative, serving as the new swing vote in decisions. It was noted how many Catholics are among the justices in the high court. Excerpted from Susan Jacoby’s recent book The Age of American Unreason (pages 198- 199): [...] five out of the nine current members of the Supreme Court are Roman Catholics: Roberts, Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy. Of these, only Kennedy, as evinced by his unpredictable votes on abortion cases, can be considered a mainstream Catholic in his attitudes toward church and state. Kennedy also voted to uphold Oregon’s assisted suicide law, while Roberts, Scalia and Thomas (Alito was not yet on the high court) abandoned their usual conservative support for states’ rights and voted to strike down a law ratified three times by Oregon voters. The church’s position on assisted suicide and the right to die, like its position on abortion, is a matter of dogma.
Scalia, a profoundly conservative Catholic as well as a profoundly conservative jurist, has said bluntly that Catholic officeholders should resign if asked to uphold any public policies that contradict church doctrine [...]. Scalia’s rationale for the death penalty merits close inspection because it comes directly from the Bible and is identical to the arguments used by Protestant fundamentalists against secular government and secular values. In Scalia’s view, democracy itself is responsible for opponents to the death penalty, because secular democracy rests on the principle that governmental power comes not from the consent of the governed but from God. [...quoting Scalia himself, Jacoby went on to write]: ...the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. [Jacoby further notes, later in the same paragraph, that this is a big deal for]: ...a justice of the United States Supreme Court to base important legal decisions, affecting Americans of all faiths and no faith, on his religious belief in an afterlife. End of quotes.
Brayton made the distinction between process conservatives and ideological conservatives on the Supreme Court, with Scalia and Thomas being so fiercely ideological and extreme in their opinions that they are willing to bring down decades of precedent in a heartbeat, as he put it. The process conservative approach is a more incremental one and involves more grounds on which to base one’s opinion than just a purely ideological one. As attorney Eddie Tabash noted (as well as Ed Brayton) when he spoke to us, with the advanced ages and the poor or tenuous state of health of the Justices who tend to base their opinions in a more moderate fashion, the outcome of our next national election is of paramount importance as to the selection of replacements for the High Court, with severe repercussions as to our civil liberties to occur for years and years to come, should the court swing any further to the right.
Summarized and synthesized by Charles LaRue.
