In Pennsylvania, police arrested a man for using his cell phone to record a video of police having an "interaction" with the man's friend. The police charged the man with "wire tapping". Wire tapping?? The absurdity is palpable. The police claim he was filming the police "without their permission".
The ACLU is stepping into this. According to the Post Gazette,
"The First Amendment guarantees people a right to record police officers' behavior in public places, and this right is vital to documenting and discouraging police misconduct," said Witold Walczak, the state legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
The ACLU is also stepping into the issue of the Fed's use of internet tracking devices to gather information about web users. According to the ACLU website,
"Though this is a major shift in policy, the announcement of this program consists of only a single page from the federal register that contains almost no detail."
“This is a sea change in government privacy policy,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, Acting Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Without explaining this reversal of policy, the OMB is seeking to allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website. Until the OMB answers the multitude of questions surrounding this policy shift, we will continue to raise our strenuous objections.”
8 comments:
Here is a list of cases where the ACLU defended Christians as well as other religions.
The ACLU is no friend of Christians, nor libertarians, nor conservatives. Its founder, Roger Baldwin said, "I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
The ACLU fights against every instance of good character; it actually fought for the right of pedophiles to have access to playgrounds. Baldwin was a friend of Margaret Sanger, eugenist and founder of abortion mass producer, Planned Parenthood. The ACLU has always supported abortion.
Balwin was a self-annointed elitist, and the elitism of the ACLU remains intact today. They consistently look for activist judges to get their extra-constitutional activism into the legal history. They rarely pursue anything that reflects either the constitution or the historical majority view.
Now that there are strong legal defense organizations such as ADF and ACLJ, the ACLU rarely wins its bizarre positions any more. But it is still a heavily funded threat to liberty. Its objectives remain to elevate the elites into power over the masses.
Well, first of all, what about the list I linked to? Instead of responding to that, you attacked the views of its founder. I would label this ad hominem.
Secondly, Roger Baldwin denounced communism in his book A New Slavery and set about to purge the ACLU of totalitarians.
Reference
Perhaps you are right, I should attack the ACLU more on the basis of their actual deeds. Baldwin’s slippery positions however should start with understanding this:
“If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.” Roger Nash Baldwin, 1934.
Perhaps he sincerely recanted in 1953. With a worldview of relativistic Atheism it is not possible to tell for certain, using only the words of the relativist, which are, well, relative only to the current situation, because for the relativist, of course, there is no truth and no lies. So I have my sincere doubts, given the passion of his earlier fight for the class war, and the ongoing class (and race) warfare promoted by the ALCU. So following their deeds I maintain that they have not changed as much as they would have you believe.
Their defense of free speech includes child pornography and the defense of NMBLA. It includes porn availability to children through the libraries. And as I mentioned before, it includes the rights of pedophiles to have access to playgorounds. Do you defend that? Is that one of the Christian defenses? It is unconscionable to most reasonable people.
As horrific as NAMBLA's views are, they are still supported by the constitution. The ACLU was apparently defending them because parents of a boy who was murdered by two pedophiles were trying to blame the crime on NAMBLA. I don't know enough details to have an opinion on it.
And as horrific as child pornography is, it IS possible to go too far in the other direction as well. We live in a culture where people are ending up on the permanent sex offender registry because they dated their 17 year old boyfriend/girlfriend when they were 18! Some of these couples are now married with children, but on the sex offender registry! And in Australia, the government is attempting to block websites that contain possible child pornography, with all the predictable collateral censorship. The ACLU fights similar cases, where ridiculous laws have all kinds of secondary free speech repercussions. They also defend cases of virtual child porn; cases where legal age people impersonate children. As vile as you and I may find this, I don't see how this can be considered illegal. They don't "defend" child pornography outright.
I think the problem is that they defend free speech, including/especially when the defense is extremely hated as these are the people are most likely to have their rights trampled on by the majority. Because of this it's easy to hate them and see them as defending evil, but it's simply not true.
On that list I linked to, the ACLU:
- stopped the censorhip of Christian reading materials in a Virgina prison
- defended a prison pastor who was ordered to stop preaching Christianity to other prisoners
- defended a person who was preaching the Bible on a public street in Louisiana
- defended Christians who were protesting against a gay pride event in Florida
- defended a child in school who wrote a story about Christ's Resurrection
- defended a Christian holding a sign in front of Wal Mart telling shoppers not to shop at Wal Mart because they support gay marriage
- filed suit against Las Vegas when the city tried to outlaw evangelical Christians preaching on the sidewalks
- defended two girls who wore anti-abortion shirts to school
- defended a Baptist minister's right to perform baptisms in a public park
Martin,
I see that your personal truth statements are still intact and kicking. Do you realize that you cannot successfully defend the morals of an Atheist, postmodern, relativist entity? Such an entity doesn't subscribe to morals, it tries to dictate their own relativist, fabricated, temporary "ethics" to others.
For example, free speech is not a moral value, it is a conditional right that carries responsibilities. The ACLU treats free speech like it is a moral value, because that is their only form of morality, being Atheist and therefore having no obligation to Judeo-Christian revealed moralities.
For those reasons the constitution is viewed, as you have said before, as not being meaningful in the light of popular culture. What popular culture declares to be valid supercedes the constitution; so the ACLU tries to drive popular culture through such tactics as incitement of blacks against police, attempted installation of anti-religious doctrine in schools, defense of sexual perversion, etc. These are all declared to be "ethical" in the sense that popular culture cannot shake itself of them, so they stick and determine what the new morality is to be.
By declaring the death of actual moral, character values through its actions, the ACLU eliminates any respect from those of us remaining in the culture that still subscribe to character values.
A culture that allows and defends the mass murder of its preborn progeny will ultimately succumb to a war of non-morality vs. non-morality. Over 50,000,000 killed to date: where's the outrage?(as you like to say...) But, Oh well, there are no morals beyond the "privacy" clause which allows a woman to kill her offspring so long as she does it in private: the NEW ethical value, given moral bearing.
You cannot defend an entity that has no morals beyond its own dictates, using morality as a defense.
BTW a war between competing Atheist amoralities, say China vs. North Korea, or Russia vs. China, would truly be a spectacle to behold, wouldn't it? And what if the Atheist amoralities include the ALL NEW USA?
"I see that your personal truth statements are still intact and kicking."
No worries. I will still follow your suggestion in the other thread, but as I said it will have to be more objective than subjective, at least temporarily. More like an experiment in that one thread than actually changing my views right now across the board.
ACLU
So... you DON'T think there should be freedom of speech across the board, as long as it doesn't incite violence against others?
Atheist Wars
And Denmark too! One of the most atheistic countries in the world! That vile den of tyranny, where the people are oppressed relentlessly by the Atheist Storm Troo.... oh wait.
So what about Western and Northern Europe? For all your attempts to link atheism with tyranny, isn't this area of the world contradictory to your notion?
By not changing your views you reveal your insincerity; you are keeping your views, unchallenged, in your promotion of personal proclivities. Perhaps insincerity is too mild a descriptor. It's not a game.
Actually I do think that most speech should be free across most of the board; I do not suggest that the ACLU should be banned or stopped. But part of free speech is my part, that part where I am free to show the ACLU for what it is, based on what it does.
Free speech comes with personal responsibility, a notion foreign to the ACLU. The ACLU is forever focused on blaming. Blaming society, blaming the cops, blaming racism, blaming schools. Transferring the blame is necessary if one is to have someone to sue; someone to sue is necessary if one is to keep the federal funding coming in. By persistent blame transfer, the entire concept of personal responsibility gets not just lost, it gets run over, killed and forgotten. And to the ACLU, that's no loss.
The ACLU complains about the unequal number of blacks in prison, as if it should be an equal opportunity function of society. Nowhere is the focus placed on the responsibility of blacks, black leadership, black men, to create stability in black families, to promote positive character habits, to defy government schooling and provide real education and self-discipline training to black youth.
Now as for Europe, that icon of historical peace and love across the millenia, just wait. And as I recall, Denmark was the place that was too gutless to stand up for free speech against the Muslim pique over cartoons of Mohammed, right? The fun is just starting over there.
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