Hurrah for the ACLU In Charlottesville, a principled stand for the speech rights of even odious speakers.By William McGurn
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurrah-for-the-aclu-1502751069
It’s not every day this columnist finds himself on the same side as WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union.
That’s especially true for the ACLU, because these days it has too often let progressive politics trump its founding mission of protecting core civil liberties such as speech and due process. All the more reason, however, to applaud the ACLU for the principled—and unpopular—stand it took in Charlottesville, Va., for free speech.
In two tweets put out just hours after James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others, the ACLU’s national office explained its work in Charlottesville this way. “The First Amendment is a critical part of our democracy,” it said, “and it protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech. For this reason, the ACLU of Virginia defended the white supremacists’ right to march.”
This, of course, hasn’t tempered the outrage on Twitter , where the attacks on the ACLU are mostly variations of “How could you?” Or in the New York Times , where a Princeton prof complained that the ACLU goes out of its way “to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses but has been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments.” On Monday Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe piled on, suggesting the violence was the ACLU’s fault.
The unkindest cut came from within, when a board member of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter resigned in protest of . . . well . . . the ACLU. “I won’t be a fig leaf for Nazis,” declared Waldo Jaquith.
Plainly Mr. Jaquith, when he joined the ACLU, somehow hadn’t noticed that way back in 1977 the organization had defended a similarly provocative plan by Nazis to hold a march in Skokie, a Chicago suburb where Jewish Holocaust survivors constituted a high percentage of the population. In the end the ACLU prevailed at the Supreme Court but lost many donors and members in the process. (Ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie.) CONTINUE AT SITE
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