Tag: aclu

ACLU: Trump’s gag order in federal case is unconstitutional

For four years during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, the American Civil Liberties Union was one of his biggest courtroom adversaries. Now, the group is taking his side in a high-profile fight over what Trump can say as a criminal defendant.

The ACLU on Wednesday stepped into the battle over Trump’s federal gag order, arguing that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan violated Trump’s First Amendment rights as well as the public’s right to hear him when she issued the order earlier this month. Chutkan is presiding over the criminal case special counsel Jack Smith is pursuing against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“The obvious and unprecedented public interest in this prosecution, as well as the widespread political speech that it has generated and will continue to generate, only underscores the need to apply the most stringent First Amendment standard to a restraint on Defendant’s speech rights,” ACLU attorneys wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The group urged Chutkan to reevaluate her order, calling it both vague and overbroad, with aspects of its meaning “unknown and perhaps unknowable.” One particular uncertainty the ACLU seized on was the meaning of Chutkan’s prohibition on statements that “target” Smith, his prosecutors, court personnel, defense attorneys or witnesses.

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Federal Judge Orders School District To Allow After-School Satan Club

A federal judge on Monday ordered that a Pennsylvania school district must allow The Satanic Temple (TST) to use school property for its clubs, according to the ruling.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against Saucon Valley School District (SVSD) after it allegedly denied an application from TST to host its “After School Satan Club,” despite having accepted the request earlier. A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction Monday, requiring the district to allow the club while the lawsuit continues, according to the ruling.

“When confronted with a challenge to free speech, the government’s first instinct must be to forward expression rather than quash it,” the ruling read. “Here, although The Satanic Temple, Inc.’s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment’s protections must prevail. Indeed, it is the First Amendment that enumerates our freedoms to practice religion and express our viewpoints on religion and all the topics we consider sacred.”

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Satan Clubs Should Be Allowed in Schools

On March 31, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit against Pennsylvania’s Saucon Valley School District after it dismantled the “After School Satan Club,” an after-school program sponsored by the Satanic Temple with chapters across the country, allegeding the club failed to communicate that it was not formally sponsored by the district. The ACLU argues that the removal was actually motivated by the hundreds of angry messages the district received from local parents and the general public. 

Saucon Valley is not the only American community bedeviled by Satan clubs. Similar clubs in Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, California, and New York have all generated controversy. The primary concern, as one Pennsylvania parent put it, is that “Satan is here to kill and destroy.” Other parents have asserted that the United States is “one nation under God” and that to deny Satan a place in public schools is therefore a necessary and prudent measure. The Napa Legal Institute’s Frank DeVito even used Satan clubs to justify restoring the pre-World War II tradition of blasphemy laws. 

After School Satan Clubs (and most modern Satanists) do not literally worship Satan. Satan clubs espouse “free inquiry and rationalism,” and “[do] not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus.” The Satanic Temple openly rejects the supernatural, using Satan’s name and image for shock value. 

But even if Satan Clubs were actually worshiping Satan, there’s little that can (or should) be done about them. A defense of American pluralism requires a defense of, or at least apathy toward, Satanism. 

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Another Facial Recognition Snafu Leads to False Arrest, Wrongful Imprisonment; ACLU Asks Lawmakers to Ban Police Use

Instead of enjoying a late Thanksgiving meal with his mother in Georgia, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail in November after he was falsely identified as a luxury purse thief by Louisiana authorities using facial recognition technology.

That’s according to Monday reporting by NOLA.com, which caught the attention of Fight for the Future, a digital rights group that has long advocated against law enforcement and private entities using such technology, partly because of its shortcomings and the risk of outcomes like this.

“So much wrong here,” Fight for the Future said Tuesday, sharing the story on Twitter. The group highlighted that many cops can use facial recognition systems without publicly disclosing it, and anyone’s “life can be upended because of a machine’s mistake.”

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How did free speech become a right-wing value?

Canadian Conservative politician Andrew Scheer picked up on this strange phenomenon back in April, saying that that the corporate media framing free speech as a “right wing value” was just plain weird. As though to drive home the point, Twitch’s Zachary Ryan called Musk a right-winger on Monday. And over the weekend, entrepreneur Samir Tabar had a question for a whiny Robert Reich:

Stop using Musk as your punching bag. Twitter was full of people who had opinions before Musk was around. What you label as ‘misinformation” are just views you don’t like. Deal with it. Since when is free speech a right wing value?

— Samir Tabar (@SamirTabar) December 11, 2022

Answer: since, well, now.

The evolution of this trend is not new. It was less than three years ago that the American Civil Liberties Union — which for decades was committed to an absolutist vision of free speech — signaled that it was no longer interested in defending the speech of those who don’t share the organization’s values.

Former ACLU head Ira Glasser has been vocal in opposing this shift not just at his old place of employment but among the left at large. As Spiked reported back in February 2020 (emphasis added), “This idea, Glasser laments, is alien to a lot of young people today, who see the ‘First Amendment as an antagonist to social justice’. Indeed, on US campuses ‘progressives’ constantly agitate for right-wing speakers, from Charles Murray to Ben Shapiro, to be banned or forcibly shut them down. ‘Hate speech is not free speech’ is a common refrain.”

That last sentence is key.

The ACLU, which in 1978 famously defended arguably the worst hate speech there is — Nazi speech — is now following the left-wing trend of labeling things it doesn’t like, and even Musk’s dedication to free speech, as promoting hate speech.

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Democrat Lawyer: ACLU ‘Defended Terrorists, Nazis, And They Would Not Touch Covid Issues’

Democrat lawyer Scott Street quit his law firm to legally defend from Joe Biden’s federal vaccine mandate Americans’ right to make their own medical decisions, he told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview for Fox Nation. Medical freedom cases “probably made up two-thirds of my practice last year,” The Federalist contributor and California resident explained.

“I couldn’t sit by and see people get away with this,” he said, “but it was tough, no question.”

Street “couldn’t believe anyone was going along with” lockdown mandates, “because I thought it was blatantly illegal,” the civil rights lawyer told Carlson.

The longtime Democrat strategist and campaign staffer told Carlson he’d worked with liberal legal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel for years and couldn’t believe they refrained from contesting what he saw as obvious mass infringements of Americans’ civil liberties after Covid-19 reached the United States.

“These are groups that defended terrorists after 9/11, Nazis, they’ve defended everything, and they would not touch any of these Covid issues,” Street said.

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The ACLU is now siding with the censors

Asserting their First Amendment rights against compelled speech, elementary-school teachers in Loudoun County, Virginia, are challenging a school-board rule requiring them to address transgender and ‘gender expansive’ students by their preferred pronouns. The teachers claim that the pronouns convey messages about transgenderism that violate their religious beliefs as well as their understanding of biology. As a compromise, in an effort to balance their speech rights with students’ interests in being recognised, the teachers have offered to address the students only by their names, eschewing the use of any offending pronouns. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sided against them.

Confirming its transformation from a free-speech organisation into a progressive advocacy group, it has submitted a brief in Cross v Loudoun County, advocating restrictions on fundamental First Amendment freedoms. According to the ACLU, public-school teachers should be required to affirm controversial, state-imposed orthodoxies about sex and gender in violation of their conscience, in order to protect students from discrimination.

Sad to say, the ACLU’s brief against the First Amendment is neither a shock nor a surprise – it was predictable. Its retreat from defending speech that conflicts with progressive values and ideas dates back at least 15 years. Still, there is a difference between avoiding litigation that requires defending the right to use whatever progressives consider harmful speech and engaging in litigation to suppress it or to compel speech aimed at mitigating its alleged harms. The ACLU has crossed a line, effectively advancing arguments about the direct, indisputable dangers of offensive language and ideas that have long been used to justify bans on ‘hate speech’.

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The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) surprised even many of its harshest critics this week when it strongly defended coercive programs and other mandates from the state in the name of fighting COVID. “Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” its Twitter account announced, adding that “vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public.”

If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of “vaccine mandates” and “vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that “some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute”) to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:

[W]hen it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. . . . In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. . . . .

[Many claim that] vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others. . . . While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. . . .

While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. . . . . Where a vaccine is not medically contraindicated, however, avoiding a deadly threat to the public health typically outweighs personal autonomy and individual freedom.

The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”

What makes the ACLU’s position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.

The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: “Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today’s ACLU is now advocating for COVID.

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ACLU Says the State Forcing People to Take Vaccines is a Victory For Civil Liberties

The ACLU has published an article in the New York Times followed up by a tweet which asserts that the government forcing people to take vaccines is a victory for civil liberties.

No, this isn’t out of the Babylon Bee.

“Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” the organization’s tweet ludicrously claimed. “They protect the most vulnerable, people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of color hit hard by the disease.”

The tweet linked to a New York Times opinion piece written by ACLU staffers which further amplified claims that the government forcing people to take a vaccine under threat of them losing their jobs, social lives and potentially in the future the right to buy and sell was actually a boon for civil liberties.

What’s next? Maybe the ACLU will call for the government to forcibly incarcerate Americans for their controversial political opinions because it might ‘prevent harm’.

Respondents on Twitter were swift to ridicule the organization’s absurd hypocrisy.

“The government forcing a needle in your arm is actually them furthering your civil liberties” is quite the take even from Marxists like you. Thank you for dropping the mask to reveal yourselves though,” remarked Robby Starbuck.

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The ACLU Is Suing To Give The Government More Power To Mask Your Kids

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing South Carolina over a ban on mask mandates in schools.

Earlier this summer, the South Carolina state legislature passed a budget bill with conditions prohibiting school districts from using government funds to “require that its students and/or employees wear a face mask at any of its education facilities.” Scientific studies are clear that COVID-19 transmission among children is much lower than among adults but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration, the CDC, teachers’ unions, and now the ACLU from pushing for students and vaccinated teachers to mask up this fall.

The leftist activist group, which represents several parents of children with disabilities and other groups, is targeting Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, his administration, and certain school districts for prohibiting face-covering requirements because they say the rule “effectively exclude[s] these students with disabilities from participation in the public education system, in violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act].”

“School districts with students who have disabilities, including underlying medical conditions, that make them more likely to contract and/or become severely ill from a COVID-19 infection have a legal obligation to ensure that those children can attend school with the knowledge that the school district has followed recommended protocols to ensure their safety,” the lawsuit states, citing the CDC’s anti-science universal masking protocols for children as young as two years old.

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