The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sold many college students on the notion that the group defends the downtrodden against the powerful. In reality, the ACLU bears a closer resemblance to the insulated plutocrats it inveighs against than it does to any underdog that you can think of.
“The ACLU forced a Catholic charity to pay for an employee’s abortion and an Orthodox Jewish charity to provide housing for an avowedly lesbian employee and her lover,” Steve Aden of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) said at a seminar on Capitol Hill. The ADF provides legal representation to such religious groups.
“The ADF is winning three-quarters of the cases that it undertakes against the ACLU,” Aden told the crowd at the Washington Court Hotel in a conference organized by the Eagle Forum. Aden estimates that the ACLU, in turn, is involved in 5,000 cases.
As the above examples indicate, what the group specializes in is telling people what they can do with their time and money, advice that most civilized peoples do not regard as congruent with civil liberties. In so doing, the ACLU manages to politicize some of the most historically apolitical institutions in the United States.
What the ACLU never bargained for is that fundamental law of physics: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Indeed, the Boy Scouts may have spent more time in court on ACLU-inspired lawsuits in the last decade than the youth group spent in litigation in the rest of its history. Attorney Peter Ferrara of the American Civil Rights Union, which has handled every court case involving the Boy Scouts since 2000, outlined some of these legal controversies:
• “In Boy Scouts v. Dale, the Scouts fired a scoutmaster who was openly gay,” Ferrara noted. “The Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of the Boy Scouts.”
• “In Balboa, California, the Boy Scouts built a facility and gay parents objected. The case is in appeal.”
In the most recent case, “In Philadelphia, the Boy Scouts built the building they are in via an arrangement with the city government in the 1920s.” Unfortunately, the current crop of city fathers objects to BSA’s “don’t scout” policy for homosexuals and wants them to rent the building at much higher rates than they are paying now. ($1 v. $200,000 annually).
The Scouts have, since Ferrara spoke, elected to take the city to court. Against this backdrop, it is hardly astonishing, as Ferrara points out, that “A Newt Gingrich/American Solutions poll shows 7-10 percent public support for ACLU positions.”
As Aden related, drawing from ACLU position papers, some of these tenets include:
• “Once child pornography is produced, no law enforcement efforts should stop its distribution;
• “All laws prohibiting polygamy and same-sex marriage should be eliminated; and
• “Prostitution should be ‘decriminalized’ since laws prohibiting prostitution are a violation of the right to individual privacy.”
Also, “School officials cannot inform parents if their children are openly engaging
in homosexual behavior during school hours.” This heartfelt advocacy, in turn, is quite lucrative for the ACLU.
“Under current federal statutes, parties can threaten to file lawsuits claiming cities and towns have violated the Establishment Clause, or the prohibition against the establishment of a state religion,” U. S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., states. “Local officials know that a single adverse judgment at any level of the court system will require them to pay not only their own legal fees, but the plaintiffs’ as well, and that these legal fees will come at the cost of local taxpayers.”
“It is a win-win situation for the ACLU and its affiliates, who often get their desired result just by threatening these localities in the first place; because it is often cheaper for the localities to capitulate to the ACLU, than go to court where, win or lose, they are still going to have to pay exorbitant legal fees.” How big a slush fund does this create for the ACLU?
Andy Schlafly of Eagle Forum calculated, just from public cases that have received ample media coverage, that ACLU attorneys raked in $18 million from 67 cases whether they went to court or not.
He is the son of the founder of Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly, herself an attorney.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
