As I understand things, they tend to leave gun rights stuff to the enormous and well-funded NRA.
In cases from "Roe vs Wade" to "Masterpiece Cakeshop" and "Hobby Lobby" the ACLU came out against things supported by the religious right. And although the ACLU regularly supports the free speech rights of swastika-tattoed nazis - Republicans don't see that as supporting their side, because no reasonable person wants to think people with swastika tattoos are on their side.
Unfortunately so. It didn't use to be that way - the ACLU used to be so principled that they would defend literal Nazis' rights. But they've fallen a long way since then.
Especially when individual liberty is in contention with collective liberty. This is the "hard problem" for organizing a free society.
Eliminating traffic laws would make individuals more free in a literal sense, but those rules also make it so people can get from place to place quickly and safely. The liberty interpretation is that what people actually want is to travel, not to drive however they like. So you trade a freedom most people don't miss to enable another.
Vaccine mandates are a great example of this contention where under normal circumstances nobody cares about having to get vaccinated but they do care about not getting polio. Covid was strange in that the number of people opposed was significantly larger than I think anyone expected.
Agree, but (and yes, whataboutism ahoy!) one can make observations about a similar lack or principle on the right.
It always seemed to me that the US was fuzzy when the very clear text of the Constitution rubbed up against the realities of a complex State. For example,
- the 1st Amendment doesnt say the speech can be overridden by a compelling national security interest, which is the argument here. But the US has security services, and legitimately there are cases where to allow speech does harm. But if you are going to be honest, shouldnt there be an amendment giving the State an override of 1A?
- 2A is infamous, of course, and for the love of $deity lets not discuss it here, but why does "not abridged" get overriden by bans in, say, machine guns, which have been on the books since the Chicago gangster era? Either you abridge or not. Or at least be honest about it .
- Some speakers in the covid era made a very strong appeal to personal bodily autonomy when it came to vaccine mandates. Ok, let's follow that. Does it not then also follow that a woman cannot be forced to carry a baby to term? That would seem logical, but the connection is not made. Conversely there is no "commonweal" override written into the Constitution and we are left with random SCOTUS decisions over the last 240 years.
Because the people 250 years ago could not have imagined the problems that we'd have invented for ourselves in these days. It was always meant to be a living document with a process of adding and changing amendments. And in between that time the the way people interact has grown more complex. If you took those same intelligent men and dropped them into today, the Amendments would look different.
It’s not a certain company, it’s a whole class of them (partially defined by POTUS’ whims)
Sure, the government can do that, and when doing so infringes on Americans’ speech or access to information, it introduces First Amendment questions that must be addressed.
“The government says CNN can’t post stories from BBC” isn’t immediately resolved by “it’s a foreign company.”
It sounds like you're saying that there's some content on TikTok that Instagram Reels/YouTube Shorts/etc. won't allow on their platforms. Is that correct? If so, can you give an example?
Both of these I suspect are handled sorta explicitly by giving the state the power to do whatever it wants if it is important and essential enough.
The courts have various categories for how important something needs to be to allow certain levels of unconstitutionality, eg suppose I have "legally" built the nuclear device featured in a recent kurgesatz video with enough kiloton to start by itself a nuclear winter kill every person on the planet... I seriously suspect SCOTUS will be ok with the state taking the ignition keys away from me
In the sense of an adherent to Nazism, yes, neo-Nazis are Nazis.
In the context of "literal Nazis" the ACLU had argued for the rights of - like the German American Bund, which contained actual members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, not exactly.
No that would contradict freedom of association. People are free to form closed, self-censoring groups if they choose to. What we want to avoid is the government forcing it on people.
The paradox of tolerance specifically states that one must not be tolerant of intolerance. Hence, a paradox.
Tolerance is a social contract of leaving alone others whose ways differ from your own so long as they do the same for you.
One must not tolerate those that call for violence and subjugation of differing groups, which is almost the exact opposite meaning your comment seems to be implying in my reading of it, instead calling for wholly unfiltered speech by whosoever should deem to speak.
Racists and similar hatemongers calling for others to tolerate them while they are screaming for those they disparage to be caste down and out cannot be tolerated in any reasonable forum.
As such, any reasonable forum must ban some facets of free speech.
That we disallow this power for governments is a reasonable limit on the powers of the elected to rule, lest those powers be abused.
The problem with this interpretation is of course that it lets you be as intolerant as you want to anyone you decree intolerant. Which is why it is so popular.
For those unaware of ACLU's change over the last 10 or so years, here is an example:
In September 2021, the ACLU wrote a New York Times op-ed defending vaccine requirements, arguing they actually advance civil liberties by protecting the most vulnerable and allowing more people to safely participate in public life. David Cole and Daniel Mach, the authors, wrote that individual liberty isn't absolute when it puts others at risk.
Surely, one can be pro vaccine mandates. But I would not expect a civil liberties organization to hold this position.
Pretty much every measure taken against COVID had been taken many times before during the numerous epidemics of cholera, typhus, yellow fever, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza that plagued (no pun intended!) the US since its founding.
Requiring inoculation/vaccination, shut downs, masks, and quarantines was generally considered a legitimate use of state power to prevent the spread of deadly diseases and not an infringement of civil liberties.
Actually this goes back to even before the US was founded. George Washington imposed mandatory smallpox inoculation on his army during the revolution. This probably contributed significantly to his victory because both the British army and native tribes that had sided with the British were heavily weakened by smallpox but Washington's was not due to that inoculation requirement.
Please share any pre-Covid example of the government shutting down all public gatherings including weddings and funerals and closing the vast majority of businesses for a substantial period of time.
There may have been isolated examples in the past, but the degree was not the same.
You wouldn't expect a civil liberties organization to have an opinion on containing a dangerous pandemic? In addition to working at the ACLU the people doing their work are also humans.
Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
That’s a clear curtailment of their civil liberties. And assuming they’re in a rural area may not harm anyone else either.
This is an obviously extreme example but the point still stands. Any civil liberties organization cannot focus absolutely narrowly on that question in every situation but has to apply a broader approach.
Surely you see the difference between someone having Strategic weapons in their garage, and the government forcing someone to take a medicine that they don't want to take, right?
All individual rights are balanced with the rights of other individuals/society. You can be given the choice to vaccinate or be forcefully quarantined. This has occurred many times in the US and the right of the state to do this has been upheld.
While corona was weak we will eventually seem some dangerous bullshit spread and the anti-vax dipshits are going figure out exactly what their rights entail as they are being drug from their house at gunpoint with the express will of the majority of the population.
Quarantine powers are subject to the “strict scrutiny” standard. Freedom of domestic travel is as fundamental as freedom of speech in Constitutional law. This has been thoroughly adjudicated many times and in many contexts by the US Supreme Court, including many attempts by the government to exploit regulatory and taxation loopholes to indirectly effect that outcome.
It is unambiguously unconstitutional to prevent everyone from traveling, even for quarantine purposes. It must be evaluated on an individual basis subject to judicial review to establish that the individual presents a clear and present danger, and only for a very limited duration. No different than restrictions on speech.
This is the reason no State anywhere, regardless of who was in power, instituted hard lockdowns during COVID. This is known to be settled law to such an extent that attempting to prevent the population from traveling without clearing the strict scrutiny standard would be met with an instant Federal court injunction, likely coupled with a withering public statement questioning the competence of the State’s Attorney General. There was no upside in taking that risk.
The idea that you can forcibly quarantine someone solely because you don’t like their choices is wishcasting, not based on credible Constitutional foundations.
There's a big difference between quarantining people who you know have a dangerous disease for a few weeks until they're better, and quarantining the entire country for years because you're not sure who has a dangerous disease.
Unlikely, freedom of domestic travel is subject to the strict scrutiny Constitutional standard (international travel is a more open question). Banning freedom of travel for the entire country would be equivalent to banning freedom of speech for the entire country, from a Constitutional perspective.
Interestingly, the myriad freedom of travel cases happened so long ago and were so decisively settled as a strong right that everyone has kind of forgotten about them because there is little interesting left to decide. Not as controversial as questions around the meaning of speech. But I think the last significant questions were addressed around the Second World War.
Yes, the government has quarantine powers, which have been broadly established. They did not necessarily have the right to go about it how they did in 2020, which was through OSHA rules and other "soft power" rather than through their power to quarantine people. Almost nobody was actually quarantined in relation to COVID.
A broad, sweeping quarantine in relation to COVID would have been so unpopular that you can see why they went about it in a "softer" way, but sometimes the government can't have its cake and eat it too.
Those vaccine mandates were broadly ruled illegal, even in light of the quarantine power. These sorts of civil liberties are complicated, and the ACLU found themselves on the wrong side of this one.
> Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
If someone actually went to court over this, I would hope/expect that the NRA would send some lawyers. The ACLU isn't that into the second amendment and has never been. However, nobody has gone to court over this. They did go to court over vaccine mandates.
By the way, the only grounds the government would have to stand on here are radiation-related. It is broadly legal to use explosives on your own property unless you're too close to someone else's property. It is also broadly legal to build your own weapons.
Advocacy organizations shouldn't aspire to extremes. The ACLU should offer reasonable and practical help and commentary on civil liberties. Otherwise, you get the modern NRA that fights every law about firearms.
This neglects that some people can't be vaccinated or they would still be vulnerable even after an effective vaccination. You're not just vaccinated to protect yourself, it also reduces risk for the people around you.
