The ACLU

I'm posting yet another Sydney J. Harris essay today... I have been reading through Pieces Of Eight quite a bit these last few days, and it sometimes seems rather silly to write my own words when I've got Sydney around to quote.

The following essay is one that I very distinctly recall having read when it was published in The Blade, my hometown newspaper, twenty years ago or more. I read Sydney's column's pretty religiously by the time I had started going to university, but I recall this particular essay having more of an effect on me than those I'd read previously.

I'm quite sure that Reagan was president at the time, but in any event, the ACLU was no doubt at the center of some political firestorm, prompting the essay.

The ACLU – like liberalism – has been caricatured by the Republicans and the radical right as un-American. Recall George Bush's befouling Michael Dukakis for being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." (It's great to see that at the top of their website they urge: "Become a card-carrying member of the ACLU.")

Frankly, I think that the ACLU is probably the one organization in this country of which every United States citizen could be a member if any wished to be a "card-carrying patriot."

The ACLU Fights For What It Hates

WHAT I LOVE MOST about the American Civil Liberties Union is that it is unique, in the pure and original sense of the word. It does what nobody else does.

What it does is fight for what it hates, while the rest of us fight (if we do at all) against what we hate. We defend only what we believe; the ACLU defends what it detests.

In New Jersey not long ago, a parochial high school refused to issue a diploma to a student because he was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the town, and he refused to renounce his membership in this rancid organization.

Nobody respectable rushed to his defense except the ACLU, which branded the school's action "a clear-cut violation of constitutional rights." It will take the case to court if it has to, and I have no doubt it will win. It usually does, in matters of civil rights.

Sometimes I think it is almost the only group in America that really understands, respects, and upholds our Constitution. Other groups are interested mostly in the rights they think will help them; the ACLU alone seems to realize that you have no protection unless you protect those you violently disagree with.

The organization was nearly wrecked a few years ago, when it also defended the right of the Nazi Party in Chicago to march through a suburb heavily populated with Jews. It lost a lot of Jewish members (who had been among its most stalwart supporters until then), but it stuck to its guns and was vindicated by the courts.

What has surprised and saddened me over the years is that its membership has been recruited largely from those who are called liberals in the political spectrum. Relatively few conservatives have ever joined it — but it seems clear to me that a genuine conservative has a deep and irrevocable stake in civil liberties.

If we really believe in our Constitution and in the freedoms it guarantees to those opinions we find most hateful, we have a moral and patriotic obligation to see that such freedoms are not curtailed for anyone. Otherwise we are phonies, invoking a liberty for ourselves that we are not willing to grant or defend for others.

When conservatives generally show as much alacrity in defending free expression — no matter how far left or right — as they do in invoking free enterprise, then I will begin to believe that they are something more than self-serving. And the best way they can demonstrate their sincerity and devotion to the Constitution is by signing up with the only group in the country that puts it on the line.