WHAT ME? JOIN THE ACLU?
Thanks but...

by William R. Carr

Ira Glasser, the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, is on a membership drive to find "50,000 caring, committed people..." I was recently honored with an invitation to join the ACLU's holy cause. Because of some mix-up, Mr. Glasser thinks I'm among what he calls "the 'saving remnant' of our society." Unfortunately, I must respectfully decline the invitation. If I'm part of any great saving remnant, it wouldn't be one he has in mind.

Be that as it may, having a great deal of libertarian blood coursing through my hardened conservative veins, I have a certain sympathy for some of what the ACLU stands for. On a few things, I've actually been on their side of the issue, but on many more we part company.

While I may be a liberal (in the ancient context of the term), I'm scarcely liberal in the ACLU context. If Mr. Glasser knew where I stand on most issues, I'm sure he would classify me as one of the "reactionaries" and "New Puritans," he warns against -- the ones threatening the ACLU vision of Liberal Utopia, (he lists Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, William Bennett, and Dan Quayle as examples in his letter.). While hardly a Puritan, and hardly in the league with the luminaries mentioned, I'll readily admit that I'm part of the conservative "backlash and reaction" to half a century of liberal overkill.

Let me point out where we agree and disagree on some of the issues mentioned in the invitation letter.

I agree whole-heartedly that the police power of the state ought to steer clear of our bedrooms, and all attempts to control the most intimate details of our personal lives. I'm against the police state.

I agree that people ought to be free to decide who they will "love, who they commit their lives to, or whether or when they pray, whether they prefer marijuana to martinis, whether they use birth control or decide to have an abortion."

But! I strongly disagree with the implication that homosexual activity should be given exactly the same social standing and legal sanction as traditional "love" and marital relationships. This may be the Puritan in me, and it also happens to conform to the ethic of what is still a large majority in this once "democratic" society.

Homosexuals, being human, are protected under the laws of basic civility just as are street people, movie stars, and politicians. They are "people" with the same rights and protections under the law to which electricians, teachers, and highway flag-persons are entitled. Our Constitution, properly observed, and Christian civility itself, protects minorities from the tyranny of the majority, regardless of the majority religious or morality codes. But that protection is not license for the kind of "in your face" flagrant violation of majority mores as have become commonplace today. There is still a significance to the term "majority rule," as well as "common" decency.

The libertarian in me would allow adult individuals the right to their own preferred vices and sins, so long as they do not harm or infringe upon the rights of others. That, simply stated, is a basic fundamental to freedom. I would, however, retain the terms perversion, sin, and vice, in relation to certain homosexual activities and drug use. (I would not call homosexuals perverts, but nonetheless their preference in sexual activity is a perversion of the purpose and meaning of sex.) That said, I would let them do what they will behind closed doors -- as they have always done and cannot be stopped from doing. I would not have the state in anybody's bedroom, or waging all-out national and international war on nonconformist groups, mere weeds, weed smokers, dope addicts, or third world peasant farmers.

While the state should not be at war with its "alternate life-style" and drug-using minorities, it should rightfully play a role in discouraging their conduct. This should be done by simply allowing "majority rule" at the state and local level in educational matters. There should be no potheads or pot farmers in prison unless they have committed murder, aggravated assault, theft, or some other grievous crime. Homosexuals shouldn't be molested either by bigots or law enforcement -- but nor should they flout their activities among people, or communities, that find their activities, and "displaying," repugnant.

I agree that "... the morality of a nation is measured not by what occurs in the privacy of our bedrooms, but by how our society treats its people..."; that justice and fairness should prevail; that people should be equal before the law; that it should be "safe" to be different in a world where majority rules. I couldn't agree more with all of these things the ACLU claims to champion.

The ACLU claims the New Puritans are against all of the above. If I am a New Puritan, the ACLU paints with an over-broad brush.

I disagree that today's society is much better morally than our society of the 1950's. True, we still had some hellacious hang-ups in the fifties -- hold-overs from earlier eras -- which have since been addressed. But by-in-large, even in spite of the glaring injustices that continued to exist in that era, I believe we lived in a better society than today. Perhaps most significantly, children, both black and white, grew up in two parent households.

Not that government was much better in the fifties. Tyranny stalked the nation then as now, but society as a whole was much more civil than it is now. We've made some spectacular improvements in the intervening years, with regard to the practices of  "equality under the law" with regard to race. But today we have much bigger social problems than even our former institutionalized bigotry. We've leaped from our old errors into equally, and even more grievous, error -- from one extreme to another -- and broken families, the drug culture, and burgeoning prison populations stand in testimony of the fact.

I agree that the state should not be allowed to use its police powers to force conformity to a certain "harsh and narrow" moral code. But I disagree that the 50's were "a time of moral depravity." Few people were "lynched" in the 50's for protesting unfair laws. Many more are figuratively "lynched" today than at any other time in our nation's history. Many are sent off to lengthy prison terms for relatively minor, victimless, offenses. Many others are deprived of life before they take their first breath.

Today literally millions of unborn human beings are killed in the womb every year for the sake of mere convenience of mothers in their quest of "equality." One can argue otherwise until all the green cheese in the moon turns to gold, but abortion is still the taking of innocent human life. While I would not deny women the right to an early abortion under certain compelling circumstances, national policy dehumanizing of life in the womb is perhaps the most serious official degradation of morality imaginable. If abortion isn't outright murder, it is certainly a form of early infanticide. A nine month old fetus killed before birth is still conveniently termed an abortion -- a few moments later, after birth, it would be murder. The wholesale discounting of the sanctity of human life, by Supreme Court ruling (rather than any representative or public vote), has moral implications for the nation that go far beyond the abortion issue.

I agree that homosexuals should not be "forced to live secret lives of terror." But they should live their lives quietly and in privacy, without expecting the majority to officially approve of their activities or give them special protected status.

While I may not wish to go back to the errors of the fifties, the errors of the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties have been cumulative, and have eclipsed many of the former errors. I wish that family entertainment would revert to the higher moral level which was then much more prevalent than today. A return the the old "Broadcasters' Voluntary Code of Good Broadcasting Practices" would benefit society tremendously.

I agree that "By the mid-seventies, many of the immoral conditions of the fifties had been remedied." But, due largely to continued judicial overkill, the backlash which has resulted is a rational and inevitable response. The tyranny of the majority was replaced by a tyranny of the courts. They pushed the envelope of judicial power, reaching for forced "acceptance" of a literal tyranny of minorities over the will of majorities. Many of our major cities literally self-destructed as the result. With the advent of forced integration, the majority, denied the benefit of democratic processes by the courts, was forced the vote with its feet. Along with the cities, our educational standards were practically destroyed, and generations of children, of every race, made to suffer to accommodate the new dispensation. The many gains made in the sixties and seventies were compromised by such things as Affirmative Action, which increased the chasm between the races. The "colorblind society" of equality under the law, became a race-based perversion leading to even more injustice. Men are still largely judged, and favored, by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Injustice of another kind has prevailed.

According to the ACLU, "the most dangerous judicial extremist in America" is former federal judge Robert Bork." He, they inform me, is leading "reactionaries" in an effort to strip the courts of "their constitutional jurisdiction." This reaction would never have come about if those same courts had not grossly overstepped their constitutional bounds in the first place, by literally legislating from the bench.

It became the primary mission of the courts to negate the will of the constitutional majority on issue after issue (after the legislative battles for equality under the law had already been won), usurping the power of the legislative branch of government, and turning the notion of representative republican government on its ear. The courts took it upon themselves to overpower the two other supposedly co-equal branches of government, and enforce their will against the wishes of the majority. Of course there is a long over-due backlash now gaining momentum. What else could be expected? If the courts now face a challenge to their power, they brought it on themselves. But the ACLU would preserve, not only dictatorial powers assumed by the courts, but all the perversities they have thus far decreed.

I agree that it should not be a federal "crime to use the flag to express political dissent." Respect for the flag of a nation cannot be mandated by law, just as personal morality cannot be mandated by law. Respect for the flag, or any other national symbol, must be earned by the nation it represents. Only a nation verging on, or aspiring to, totalitarianism would find itself in the embarrassing position of having to legislate respect for its own flag. If the people don't respect their nation or its flag, no power on earth is going to prevent them from expressing it. In a nation where the majority cherishes its flag, society itself will punish those who are brazen enough to desecrate it in any shameful way. The federal courts, by the way, are the ones that struck down the right of the people at state and local levels to have laws against flag desecration. The current movement for federal flag protection is merely another backlash against the court's previous and unwarranted intervention in state and local affairs.

The ACLU lives in deathly fear that "legislation restoring prayer in public schools" will be enacted, "weakening the wall separating church and state." The ACLU would welcome legislation that would forever ban prayer from the public schools. Again, it was the federal courts that has made prayer in public schools unacceptable -- again, in direct violation of the will of the vast majority of the American people. Cementing a brick and mortar judicial wall of separation of church was again the idea of the courts, not the people or their representatives. Thus the backlash.

The First Amendment to the Constitution is short and sweet on the matter of religion. It prevents Congress from establishing a state religion, and prevents it from abridging the free exercise thereof. Nothing further was implied or intended. The supposed "wall of separation" was constructed somewhere else -- in the halls of anti-Christian academia and the courts.

I agree with the concept of the separation of church and state insofar as the establishment of a state religion, or even the preaching of the gospel in public schools, is concerned.

I strongly disagree, however, with the ACLU's wish to totally suppress all religious expression, official or otherwise, in the public arena. The overwhelming majority of the American people still profess the Christian religion. Most others profess other religions which pray to the same God. So what is wrong with simple nondenominational prayer in schools? Are atheists and agnostics outraged thereby? If so, let them defer to the majority. Let them listen in respectful silence, and see what harm is done.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." That's simple tolerance.

If the Ten Commandments are posted in the schools, whose pockets are picked, and whose legs are broken?

I agree that "the civic virtue and the public morality each of us cherishes" ought to be restored and protected. But under the banner of that high-sounding purpose, in my opinion, the ACLU undermines both. It has asked me to help, and I must respectfully decline.

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