The public face of the ACLU
James Kirchick on the new and not improved ACLU:
“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” [former Executive Director Ira] Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly.
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Of course, no discussion of the ACLU can ignore Donald Trump, whose role in its degeneration, like that of so many other people and institutions opposed to him, was seismic. It was entirely appropriate that the ACLU would be one of Trump’s loudest antagonists; he made violating the letter and spirit of the Constitution an all but explicit plank of his campaign, and his upset victory subsequently led to a dramatic spike in the ACLU’s membership rolls. Accompanying this influx of new members and money, however, were pressures for the group to become another run-of-the-mill #Resistance outfit.
And thus more attractive to someone like Chase Strangio, who is not a defender of civil liberties at all. (Does Strangio defend the civil liberty to say that men are not women and women are not men? No.)
Were the ACLU today confronted with a lawsuit similar to National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, Glasser doubts the group would take it.
Mind you, I’m not ACLU (Glasser-era ACLU) material either, because I’ve never thought the ACLU were right about the Skokie case. I don’t think it’s a civil liberty to threaten people, and I think Nazis marching through a neighborhood that’s mostly Jewish is threatening those Jews.
If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff attorney named Chase Strangio. Named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time magazine last year, Strangio is the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,” Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an ACLU employee to endorse.
“Rather bizarre” is a loose translation of “Strangio.”
One of the points brought up in the piece was that the ACLU has changed from a non-partisan civil rights organization to a highly partisan political advocacy group. One friend of mine has told me that was because the Republican Party is siding against civil liberties so the ACLU really isn’t partisan, but when you have someone like Strangio wanting to “to create the information climate for the market to be more supportive of trans self-determination than the alternative” it’s clear that the ACLU is taking sides and wants to discourage speech that isn’t pro-trans self-determination. That’s absolutely not a principle that the ACLU used to stand for.
It’s having an effect. I don’t know how much of one, but I–for one–stopped renewing my ACLU membership once I saw her (Strangio’s) antics, which clearly have little or nothing to do with civil liberties.
James, me too. But not just the ACLU. NOW, an organization with women in its name, is acting like the biggest issue they should deal with is LGBTQIA+ (their acronym), specifically T. There is no one in that equation that NOW should be bothering about except the L, and I guess Q can also be women. NOW is an organization for women but now it centers men who think they’re women.
The thing with the ACLU is that you might expect them to actively support the right of people to express opinions unpopular among the left. I would not expect that of NOW or any other organization that leans liberal; silence about such issues is the most I might expect. I think the NOW position is wrong, but it doesn’t feel to me to be as totally out of character as the recent positions of the ACLU.
Re #1
I had a friend bring up the same overly simplistic analysis that Republicans are against civil liberties and Democrats are for them, therefore civil liberties is a partisan issue. This fails in several ways, but it is still a hard sell. Until their views are the ones being declared “right wing” and “hateful” and being shut down, they won’t see the problem.
Because she presumably doesn’t think that is a civil liberty. Given the tone of her tweets, she probably thinks it’s harmful to trans people, and thus saying that men are not women and women are not men is threatening to trans people.
The problem with terms like threat and threatening is that they’ve got multiple meanings, and those multiple meanings are vague and subjective. Such terms are susceptible to concept creep and to rhetorical distortion. Even much more concrete and defined things have a tendency to be applied ever more broadly over time. “Punch a Nazi” comes to mind. It’s worth being extra careful when dealing with judgements that prohibit or license behavior.
I received a fund-raising letter from the ACLU this morning and my response was to fill in the amount as ‘zero’ and write across the front “Fire Chase Strangio”. Then I mailed it back to them, postage due of course. Hope they get the message.
One can still do that??
This article about the ACLU as a case study is a very useful framework to organize my thoughts about politics changing over the years in the article. Before reading the article, I tried to use left-right or progressive-conservative as “coordinates” to track changes, but those “coordinates” have changed in themselves, or become meaningless or something.
The article confirmed a point I suspected:
So small individual donors like me can leave, but the ultra-rich donors will still control the agenda. Still, when they send me letters asking me for money, I use their return envelopes to send them letters telling them why I left. At least someone will see my letters, maybe staffers, and I might make them think.
I assume Chase Strangio fills a job description, or might have been hand-picked by an ultra-rich donor for the role. I see Strangio as a mouthpiece, not a leader at the ultra-rich donor level. Still, “Fire Chase Strangio” lets the ACLU know their former supporters are leaving them, which is the message I am sending them too.