A very pleasant surprise to report: At the Brecht Forum event in NYC the other night on civil liberties after 9/11, Ira Glasser, former director of the ACLU (and a very fine speaker) and current NYCLU director Donna Lieberman both agreed that liberals had too long relied on courts to protect freedom of speech and assembly, and not enough on popular action. Glasser pointed out that historically the courts have rarely been friends of free expression; there was that great exception during the era of the Warren court, but that time is long gone. And Lieberman pointed out that the reason that New York City relented and gave a permit for the 3/22 peace march was that a couple of hundred thousand people ignored the city's refusal to issue a permit for the 2/15 demo and marched anyway. So it sounds like they'll be relying more on popular agitation and less on litigation than they used to (which is how the ACLU, founded in the wake of the Palmer raids, got going 80 years ago).
Doug ***********
That is indeed good news. Thanks for the report Doug.
And thanks to all of you who participated in the NYC march.
Freedom lives when people do something about it and put their feeling and theories into practice.
Mike B)
===== "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity"--George Orwell
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/philosophicalcreativity/
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