Originally posted by Anthrax
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This week, an internal ACLU memo showed that the famed civil rights organization was making protection of the First Amendment a secondary concern, balancing it instead with issues of “racial justice, reproductive freedom, or a myriad of other rights, where the content of the speech we seek to protect conflicts with our policies on those matters, and/or otherwise is directed at menacing vulnerable groups of individuals.”
This is stunning language. This is the group that once defended Nazis marching in Skokie, Ill., under the terms of the First Amendment, and won. The ACLU website brags, “The notoriety of the case caused some ACLU members to resign, but to many others the case has come to represent the ACLU's unwavering commitment to principle.” Yet, now the ACLU would presumably decline the case, stating that it might be too damaging to their other social justice priorities.
The ACLU even announced that if a First Amendment speaker were to carry a gun, they would preemptively refrain from defending that speaker. Former board member Wendy Kaminer writes in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, “The speech-case guidelines reflect a demotion of free speech in the ACLU’s hierarchy of values … Faced with perceived conflicts between freedom of speech and ‘progress toward equality,’ the ACLU is likely to choose equality. If the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU's balancing test, it would greatly expand government power to restrict speech.”
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http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rig...oding-shift-in
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