The ACLU of old is, alas, no more. Gone is the organization so passionately devoted to civil liberties that it paid for a team of Jewish lawyers to defend literal Nazis’ right to free speech; in its place is an organ of the Democratic party whose main concern is keeping its cash flow as high as possible by parroting its primary donors’ beliefs (often in childish tweets repeating some a priori statement in all caps, over and over, without a word of justification), and never ever ever challenging those beliefs, no matter how anti-civil-rights and factually wrong they may be. So it was unsurprising when they recently tweeted the silly rhetorical question, “Prisons and jails aren’t drug rehab centers, so why does our country use them as such?” The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t; it uses them as cages to lock people up for the “sin” of drug use, so as to “correct” them. The newer model of drug use as “disease” has been overlaid on the old “vice” model, but has not replaced it, just as newer brain architecture has overlaid but not replaced the old architecture of emotions, instincts, etc. The same process is visible in cops vomiting out the new “whore as victim” rhetoric while still actually enacting the old “whore as criminal” model. It’s what happens when a system is bad at phasing out obsolete processes, such as the ACLU being unwilling to change its name despite the fact that it no longer has very much concern for civil liberties.
Obsolete Architecture
August 13, 2020 by Maggie McNeill
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I have noticed them getting involved in a lot of things that seemed to me to have nothing to do with freedom of speech and expression, which was their original mission.
We can say the same for the NRA, Rev. Jackson, church lobbies, and various feminist groups to name a few. Hell, most of the skeptic community, like three-fifths of the Obama-fied American “Left”, is A-Okay with authoritarianism as long as someone like Copmala, LaToya Can’t-do-anything-well, or Gavin Newscum is running the show. The Trump-ified American “Right” isn’t much better in this regard, either.
As soon as the case that became National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977) began winding its way through the courts, I began regularly making small contributions to the ACLU national organization. Later, as I saw the ACLU begin to disintegrate into the present husks of its former organization, I stopped.
These days, the organization doing the hard legal work for civil liberties is the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Their legal work includes protecting free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and numerous other freedoms which bear upon sexual freedom..
I contribute. I encourage everyone who values civil liberties to do so.
The Woodhull Foundation website is https://www.woodhullfoundation.org/
You can find many Woodhull Foundation video presentations on youtube. Just search for the name.
A very recent Woodhull Foundation video, posted on youtube only hours ago, is titled Expert Perspectives on Sex and Cannabis.