Check out Stop the ACLU for lotsa links.
The Stop the ACLU Blogburst usually has a suggested topic (thanks,
Gribbit) but this week, it’s a free fire zone, as it were, so I thought I’d take a step back and look at the ACLU from a slightly different angle.
First, I’d like to differentiate between organizations that have fallen from their origins and those like the ACLU that have stayed true to their purpose. Bodies like Congress, the YMCA and the UN (YMCA lumped in with Congress and the UN?!?!? 🙂 have quite obviously degenerated from their original purposes. The ACLU, however has remained true to its founders’ goals. While I applaud the ACLU for steadfastly standing firm in its purposes, let me note that the founders of the ACLU firmly believed that their communist philosophy would eventually overcome American capitalism and democracy, and the organization has remained true to both the goals and the methods of the founders.
ACLU founder Roger Baldwin stated in 1935, “Communism is the goal.” A year before, he had said: “When the power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means necessary.” Then in 1978, Baldwin said, “We’ve depended on the courts as the vehicle by which we assert our interpretation of the Constitution.” _1_
And the goals and methods have remained: to destroy the American experiment via corruption of the Constitution via the courts. The gains that the ACLU made in its plans through the corruption of the First Amendment, with the aid of the activist Warren SCOTUS, in suppression of Christian speech in the public arena and corruption of “free speech” into the contradictory (well, contradictory of the First Amendment itself) “free expression” has aided it well in its goal of using cultural jiu jitsu on a free and open society. By using our own values against us, via warping their meanings and winning the media war to make their interpretation popular, the ACLU has been instrumental in creating a culture that welcomes the barbarians who seek to tear it down. All in the name of tolerance and “free expression.”
Indeed, one can see how well the ACLU, which was at the forefront of the fight to redefine “free speech” as “free expression,” has won in its primary goal of changing the battleground in its favor by simply reading last week’s ACLU blogburst on the topic of the ACLU’s opposition to the Anti-Flag-Desecration Amendment being pushed in Congress, now. Many of the bloggers who posted on the topic essentially supported the ACLU’s position, because they have been brainwashed into believing that the Warren court’s invention of a right of “free expression” out of thin air is actually what the First Amendment says.
It does not. And in fact, until the Warren court, “freedom of expression” had been consistently rejected, first by Madison himself and all the way up until the early 1960s activist court made new Constitutional law ex nihilo, as this representative quote from Justice Felix Frankfruter in 1951 illustrates:
“The historic antecedents of the First Amendment preclude the notion that its purpose was to give unqualified immunity to every expression that touched on matters within the range of political interest. . . .” _2_
Madison himself noted that “free expression” was not a substitute fro “free speech.” If it were, then a separate “freedom of the press” would be redundant.
No, under any reasonable person’s reading of the Constitution, desecration of the nation’s flag is not a First Amendment issue at all. Ask Madison, who believed such a thing was criminal.
But, using just this one example, it’s easy to see how the ACLU has won at least a major battle when folks who know the ACLU is a highly destructive element in our society get steamed about flag burning as “wrong” but somehow “protected” by… the ACLU’s redefinition of the First Amendment.
See? Cultural jiu jitsu. Using our tolerance and belief (largely created with the input and direct aid of the ACLU) in protection of “free expression” as equivalent of “free speech.”
Try this: teach your dog to “speak.” Can your dog then “speak” intelligibly on matters of public policy and thus be protected in its “speech” by the First Amendment? No. Because it’s not speaking, it’s just “expressing” itself.
And that’s just about as equivalent a description as one can make of “free expression” absent words, intelligible speech. Speech, specifically political (and referencing an earlier portion of the First Amendment, religious) speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Is it protected speech if it is intelligible, political (or religious) and inflammatory?
The courts have held that it is not always so.
Is it preotected speech if it is intelligible and inflammatory and neither religious nor political?
The courts have held that it is not so far more often in these sorts of cases.
Is it even speech if it’s not… SPEECH?
Duh. Of course not, unless one is a judge or justice brought up under the propaganda of the ACLU and its ilk.
And that is the most serious threat the ACLU poses: dumbing down, watering down, diluting and polluting the Constitution with the ACLU’s “interperetation” on the way to its genuine ultimate goal of supplanting our republican government with a socialist-communist state.
Concerning the recent Grokster decision, this comment from Robert A. Heinlein (ironically, the coiner of the work “grok”—