A new civil rights group
Saturday, March 13, 1999 Oakland Tribune, triblet at angnewspapers.com
FOR many decades, the American Civil Liberties Union has had that important field practically all to itself, and in the process has imprinted on the
American psyche an image of "civil liberties" made-to-order for the American left. With the help of generous free publicity from the liberal media, it has dinned into the public consciousness an extravagant notion of the First Amendment as the chief jewel in the Constitution, capable of overriding everything else in it.
To nobody's surprise, the causes promoted by the ACLU turn out, 99 percent of the time, to serve the interests of the left; for many years it had trouble convincing itself that Communist sympathizers didn't deserve to sit on its board of directors. Once in a blue moon, it will take up the cudgel for some particularly malodorous "rightist" group: the Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, Ill., come to mind. But its heart belonged, and still belongs, to Lefty.
Perhaps the ACLU's worst blunder, at least in terms of social consequences, was the drive it opened in the 1960s to "liberate" the hundreds of thousands of mental patients then languishing in state hospitals. Powerful tranquilizing drugs were just coming onto the market, and the ACLU argued that they made involuntary commitment of most of the mentally ill unnecessary.
The state governments, which were shouldering the enormous cost of caring for these unfortunates, were all too ready to agree. Which is why, today, as many as a third of the "homeless" who have blossomed in every American city since 1980 are mental cases who, needless to say, don't get (or at any rate don't take) the medications that would at least render them harmless to themselves or others.
That is why it is extraordinarily good news that a new organization has just been formed that clearly aims to take on the ACLU on its own turf. Called the American Civil Rights Union, the group is chaired by Robert B. Carleson, a former U.S. Commissioner of Welfare and Special Assistant to President
Reagan for Policy Development, and boasts a high-powered Policy Board comprised of experts in a broad range of related fields: Judge Robert Bork; Linda Chavez, a leading Hispanic-American who formerly directed the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights; former Attorney General Edwin Meese III; Joseph Perkins, a syndicated black columnist who was Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy to Vice President Quayle; William Bradford Reynolds, former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights; Kenneth Tomlinson, formerly editor-in-chief of the Readers Digest and Director of the Voice of America; James Q. Wilson, a former professor of government at Harvard and one of America's most perceptive social analysts; and Curtis Winsor Jr., former
U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica.
The ACRU promptly announced that it "exists to defend all of the rights provided in the United States Constitution. It is not, like some organizations that claim to defend rights, interested only in those that fit a political agenda."
To prove its point, the ACRU then identified three "recent efforts to encroach on the Bill of Rights" that it will oppose:
Federal laws that violate the 10th Amendment, which reserves noninterstate crime laws to the states unless they directly involve federal matters. Such laws not only duplicate state laws, but often threaten double-jeopardy violations of the Fifth Amendment.
Federal "smart growth" policies that try to tell citizens "where to live and what kind of car to drive," thus violating the Fifth and 10th Amendments by taking property without adequate compensation and overriding the judgment of locally elected officials.
Efforts to bar citizens from legally owning guns to defend their homes and families. Recent lawsuits by some cities to curb the sale of such guns are an end run around the Second Amendment, which they know they cannot repeal or amend.
AND that's just for starters. "We consider ourselves to be a constructive alternative to the ACLU," Carleson said. That's why you won't be hearing
much, if anything, about the ACRU in the mainstream media, though it promises a vigorous presence wherever it can find a foothold.
(I'll bet this is the first you've heard about it, though it announced its agenda two weeks ago.)
Few organizations are more badly needed than this one.
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William A. Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.