State ACLU membership surges...

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
State ACLU membership surges...
19
Wed, 06-09-2004 - 6:31pm

It's not just for liberals any more... The OXe Writing The Message Is Winking 


EATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/177034_aclu09.html

State ACLU membership surges; group credits Patriot Act's backlash


Wednesday, June 9, 2004


By CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER


With her carefully landscaped home in an exclusive Eastside development, Katie Phelps, a lifetime member of the Republican Party, never expected to find common cause with activists who take to the streets in support of liberalized drug laws and gay marriage. But six months ago, she opened her wallet, wrote out a check and added her name to the list of 10,000 people who have doubled the rolls of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington over the past two years.


Phelps' support initially may have been fueled more by gratitude than political ideals -- the civil liberties watchdogs had just filed a lawsuit on her behalf that succeeded in getting the stay-at-home mom elected to Medina's City Council -- but it also reflects the group's improving image among those who once dismissed it as fringe left, irredeemably, impossibly liberal.


Phelps, who ran a last-minute write-in campaign, discovered that poll workers had failed to count 31 handwritten votes, giving the election to her opponent. After the ACLU got wind of it, Phelps was installed as the victor.


"It really opened my eyes to see the ACLU come over here to suburbia, to Republican land, based on 31 ballots," Phelps said. "It seemed like such a blip on the screen, and yet the ACLU was there for me in my tiny little race. A lot of people over here were surprised by that, and impressed."


If the numbers are any indication, thousands of others feel similarly. With more than 400,000 dues-paying members nationwide, the ACLU -- a network of lawyers and organizers dedicated to defending personal privacy, due process and political freedom -- is at an all-time high, and no state has seen a greater rate of increase than Washington, which jumped from 10,000 to nearly 20,000 members between 2001 and 2004.


Staffers attribute nearly all of the interest to backlash from the Patriot Act. President Bush's reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has granted law enforcement the right to secretly read any citizen's financial and medical records in the name of combating terrorism. Since its adoption, more than 250 town councils, village boards and city governments across the country have passed resolutions of protest.


The outcry is evident in the ACLU's quiet downtown offices, too. Before the act passed, about 60 invitations a year came in from schools and Rotary clubs seeking speakers to discuss civil liberties. By 2003, that number had tripled, and the vast majority were demanding an explanation of the Bush administration's new homeland security laws.


"It's because of John Ashcroft more than anything else," said Doug Honig, a spokesman for the Washington chapter. "People really feel that their rights are under fire, so for us, these are the worst, but also the best, of times."


While the ACLU has seen membership spikes before -- during the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, for example, the civil rights struggles of the '60s and the Watergate scandal of the '70s -- the numbers post-Sept.11 raise eyebrows even among veteran staff members.


"Whenever the body politic gets uneasy about what the government is doing, we see a rise, but nothing like this, to be sure," said Jerry Sheehan, a lobbyist with the Washington group for 21 years.



Aiding pornographers, poor


Founded in 1920 by a roomful of activists dedicated to bare-knuckles defense of the Bill of Rights, the ACLU has in its 84 years argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other organization outside the federal government. It also has aided pornographers and criminals, been reviled as "anti-God" and dismissed as a haven for communist dupes. During his campaign for president in 1988, George H.W. Bush blasted his opponent Michael Dukakis for being "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," and membership in the organization plummeted by 22,000 over the next five years.


But the ACLU, working to shed its wonk-lawyer image of old, is on a rebound. A glossy ad campaign features rock stars Michael Stipe and Sheryl Crow, and at a members conference last summer, 30 percent of attendees were under age 27.


The youth surge may have been piqued by flashy posters and an edgy online campaign, but Serenity Wise, a 19-year-old Spanish student at Highline Community College, thinks it has more to do with a general political awakening among her peers.


"Our tuition just went up," she said. "Gas prices are going up, too, and people suddenly want to know why these things are happening."


Emily Whitfield, a spokeswoman for the national office, believes several qualities particular to Washington may account for the overall increase here: a tradition of progressive liberalism, an equally strong libertarian bent and a plugged-in youth population likely to join via the Web.


Bob Skylstad, a former administrator at Boeing, considers himself none of the above. A self-described moderate, politically unaffiliated all his life, Skylstad found himself shattered by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but the administration's reaction troubled him even more.


"I just felt like I needed to take some kind of action," he said. "I felt a visceral need to be involved, that it wasn't enough to just sit by and passively read about this."


For the past year, the onetime executive has been licking stamps, stuffing envelopes and rallying other ACLU members over the phone -- "to the point where my ear would be numb from hours and hours and hours of calling," he said.


Reaction has been lukewarm among his extended family because the ACLU, in addition to defending the poor and unrepresented, also stands up for Klansmen, neo-Nazis and common criminals. Skylstad's $20 annual dues, like those of every Washington member, funnel into a national pot, so while he may take pride in the group's post 9/11 fight for the rights of non-citizens, Skylstad is also supporting the defense of organizations he reviles, such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association in Massachusetts, which advocates pedophilia. (The parents of a 10-year-old boy who was molested and murdered by a NAMBLA Web site visitor are suing the association, and the ACLU is providing a pro-bono defense based on free speech arguments.)


"There are people in my family who really think that, in some cases, the ACLU is a pretty evil organization," Skylstad said. "My brother-in-law is a devout Christian, and I could feel that he was really disappointed that I was involved."



Acting on principle


Back in Medina, Phelps never imagined that her small-town election would attract free legal aid from some of the top lawyers in the state -- almost all of whom work pro bono. But the ACLU takes cases based on their illustration of larger principles. Five months after wading into the Phelps election, the group's lawyers were launching litigation against the federal government for keeping a list of citizens to search at airports.


"I am hardly the kind of person who's camping out on the courthouse steps with all my protest materials," Phelps said. "But I will sing their praises because they are there to protect everyone's basic rights, which we can never take for granted."


Even Ashcroft's point man in Western Washington, U.S. Attorney John McKay, calls their legal work superior. What most irks the Bush administration appointee is not the ACLU's scrutiny of government but its lack of nuance. The intelligence failures prefiguring Sept. 11 were so massive, McKay said, that radical adjustments were essential.


"There are those who believe that any time government power is increased, civil liberties are hurt, and I reject that," said McKay, rolling his eyes at the ACLU's complaint that now even library loans are subject to federal scrutiny. The most significant aspect of the Patriot Act, to his mind, is a provision dismantling the wall that once separated foreign intelligence and criminal investigations.


"People who watch what the government does should be looking at this," McKay said. "It's definitely controversial, but instead, we're talking about library books."


For Kathleen Taylor, executive director of the Washington chapter, all the furor feels familiar. When she was hired in 1980, most of her experience had been monitoring CIA abuses in Washington, D.C., and later, government spying on citizens in Seattle.


"Back then, most police districts had red squads -- they actually called them that -- which were intelligence committees run amok," Taylor said. "They were not concentrating on criminal activity. They focused on political activity, which is exactly what this administration wants to do -- create a domestic secret police. So we really have come full circle."


Taylor and her colleagues at the ACLU are constitutional literalists, so those who expect they will always defend a liberal position are often puzzled -- sometimes infuriated -- by the group's support for video-game manufacturers marketing violence to children or the right of state Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders to speak at an anti-abortion rally.


Even those who benefit from their work have qualms.


State Sen. Val Stevens, a conservative Republican, has stood shoulder to shoulder with ACLU lobbyists on matters of personal privacy and the right to practice religion. But it is not a partnership that sits well.


"I think it makes us both nervous," she said. "I would never support the ACLU. I don't believe in what they do. They pretend to have a civil liberties agenda when, in fact, they are very inconsistent in the way they apply those civil liberties."


Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr expressed similar misgivings. The group's legal work is never frivolous, but at times -- as with its support for last year's marijuana initiative -- he questions their choice of causes.


"Their job is to defend the Bill of Rights," Carr said. "There is no right to smoke marijuana."


The ACLU never set out to please, however, and even foes such as Carr concede that their relentless questioning is essential.


"They're my opponents every single day," said the attorney, who in any given week may be putting out fires from half a dozen lawsuits filed by Taylor and her staff. "But without them, the system wouldn't work."



ACLU ACTIVITY

April was particularly busy for the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The group filed several major lawsuits, among them:


  • Charges that the federal government has placed ordinary citizens -- who are not suspected of wrongdoing -- on an anti-terrorist "No-Fly" list. The plaintiffs say they have no idea why they are on the list and no way to clear their names.


  • A class-action that seeks to remedy Grant County's "shamefully inadequate" public defender system which, according to the suit, deprives the poor of effective counsel.


  • A suit challenging the state's heterosexual-only marriage laws that deny same-sex couples the rights that male-female couples routinely enjoy.

    -- Claudia Rowe





    P-I reporter Claudia Rowe can be reached at 206-448-8320 or claudiarowe@seattlepi.com


    © 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer





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    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-03-2003
    Wed, 06-09-2004 - 6:52pm
    Now, if they'd only respect and defend the 2nd (as written) as diligently as they defend the rest of the Bill of Rights, we'd be getting somewhere. As long as they continue to pick and choose which rights are worth defending they're still a mixed bag of goods.


    ~mark~

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 03-23-2003
    Wed, 06-09-2004 - 6:57pm

    The problem, I believe, is not defending the 2nd (as written), it's in how the 2nd (as written) is interpreted and whether or not it needs 'defending'.


    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-03-2003
    Wed, 06-09-2004 - 7:14pm
    Well, you are correct there, as many of those interpretations are based on a creative reading of the amendment rather than the plain text of it. Of course, that's largely out of a desire to marginalize it or explain it out of existance, which contributes to the problem, but that's another subject entirely .

    Although I personally feel the ACLU goes a little off the deep end at times, I'll readily concede that they do their best for the causes they champion. I just wish they were a little more even handed when it came to those causes.


    ~mark~

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-03-2003
    Thu, 06-10-2004 - 2:47pm
    Recall what I said about the ACLU going a little too far at times? Here's a perfect example of this lack of perspective, or having a lack of anything better to do perhaps....

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2004-06-02-ladies-night_x.htm

    And from another article I can't find the specific source for...

    "Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, supported the ban and assailed ladies' night as unsavory, a marketing staple long used by bars and nightclubs to lure women to lure men.

    "The whole deal is yucky," Jacobs said. "The reason for ladies' night is so that men can get women really drunk and take advantage of them."

    But she said her reasons for supporting the ban were based on the law.

    "While this may not be the kind of ruling that hits at the heart of the pain that discrimination causes, it addresses an inequality that can be easily corrected," she said."

    See what I mean?


    ~mark~

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 03-23-2003
    Thu, 06-10-2004 - 5:53pm

    LOL!


    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-03-2003
    Thu, 06-10-2004 - 6:25pm
    Yeah, nonsense like this is why I rate them in the same category as PETA though not quite as bad as that particular group of nutcases. Both groups have good intentions at the base, but too often go overboard (make that *WAY* overboard in the case of PETA) in the zealous defense of their particular beliefs or causes. They'd both have a much better reputation with the public as a whole if they'd exercise a little more (or in the case of PETA a LOT more) common sense in their actions, perhaps be a little more circumspect before putting their name behind really senseless behavior or positions.


    ~mark~

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 03-23-2003
    Fri, 06-11-2004 - 10:40am

    LOL, well no arguement on PETA's actions...


    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-16-2003
    Fri, 06-11-2004 - 12:37pm
    >> Like I said, I don't always agree with the ACLU, but for every 'out there' case they take, they seem to take on at least three that are very valid.>>

    It is the 'out there' cases that makes the news, and didn't someone say that there is no such thing as bad publicity?

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 04-03-2003
    Fri, 06-11-2004 - 2:40pm
    I don't know that I could really agree with that... "It is the 'out there' cases that makes the news, and didn't someone say that there is no such thing as bad publicity?"

    Take a look at PETA and how much support they garner from most of the publicity they get. From where I sit, it invariably alienates far more people than it impresses and motivates to support them. It may be a little different with the ACLU, but as in this case it illustrates a certain lack of perspective and common sense needed for that or any group to grow and expand in real influence instead of marginalizing itself.


    ~mark~

    iVillage Member
    Registered: 03-23-2003
    Fri, 06-11-2004 - 2:48pm

    But the point is that they take many more cases that are very worthwhile and those are rarely ever publicized.


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