Posted: 11/2/2006 6:02:03 AM EDT
...it makes good emergency toilet paper.
Hey, it's my first cup of coffee, whadya want from me?
Anyway, I heard about this on the radio driving home the other night and it made me feel warm and fuzzy. Apparently there is a lot of internal strife at the ACLU right now.
why bother?
Mission Statement
Who We Are, What We Want and Why
We are a broad group of longtime ACLU loyalists– members, donors, supporters and activists, including former staff and members of the national or affiliate boards. We are listed at the conclusion of this statement. Many of us have been steadfast ACLU supporters and activists for decades. We do not take this step lightly.
We believe strongly in the ACLU and believe the ACLU is especially important now during a time of grave and systemic attacks on civil liberties by the national government. But an ACLU compromised by its repeated failures to practice what it preaches will be unable to resist these attacks for long. Our credibility and effectiveness depend upon our consistency of principle.
We come together now, reluctantly but resolutely, not to injure the ACLU but to restore its integrity, and its consistency of principle and remedy its failure to apply to itself core civil liberties principles that it insists everyone else observe. The failure to practice what we preach– until publicly embarrassed– has already done grievous injury to the ACLU and ultimately threatens its historic mission.
We applaud the ACLU’s recent fundraising successes , but they cannot compensate for or justify persistent breaches of principle or the abandonment of honesty when those breaches are revealed. The ACLU now stands exposed, and widely ridiculed, for repeatedly acting in contempt of its own core principles, and for chilling and even attempting to prohibit dissent within its own ranks.
Over the past three years, these breaches of principle include the ACLU’s approval of grant agreements that restrict speech and associational rights; efforts by management to impose gag rules on staff and to subject staff to email surveillance; a proposal to bar ACLU board members from publicly criticizing the ACLU; and informal campaigns to purge the ACLU of its internal critics.
All of these breaches, as well as others, violate the ACLU’s historic commitment to free speech. We take little comfort from the fact that some were reversed after bad publicity and donor complaints.
We reject the claim that the ACLU is injured not by its unprincipled, anti-libertarian actions, but by those who disclosed or criticized them. Repeated breaches of principle by the ACLU leadership have been fundamental and cannot simply be attributed to isolated lapses in judgment: they reflect basic disrespect for the values that the ACLU was created to defend.
This has gone on for so long, and has become so pervasive, that we now believe that only a change in leadership will preserve the ACLU and insure its future as the nation’s leading civil liberties group.
We call upon responsible members of the national board and the entire ACLU family to recognize and remedy this crisis before it is too late.
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