What's the beef with the ACLU?

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Its like forcing a business to spend lots of money to build wheelchair bathrooms when there is only one wheelchair person in the old darn town!

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About 40 years ago these businesses had lots of money to build entirely seperate restrooms for colored folk. Now they don't have enough money to remodel one already existing bathroom to install a larger toilet stall? How odd.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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BTW, that clause did not prevent individual states from having State Churches.

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True, until the 14th amendment was ratified. Now the 1st Amendment does apply to the states.-

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So the beef is here, you and the ACLU think that:

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"an establishment of religion" = "government endorsement of religion"

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And the judiciary as well. Since they have the responsibility to interpret the laws (including the Constitution), then this is pretty much what counts.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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This ... was not the origional intent of the Constitution.

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The writers of the Constitution have been dead for close to 200 years. We are not bound by the decisions or intents of our ancestors. It is up to us to decide how we will organize our own society.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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But wait.... I thought they are non-partisan?

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Do you know what non-partisan means? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't mean that you act as if all parties and organizations are equally in the best interests of society.Oh, alright, I'll tell you what non-partisan means. Non-partisan means that you have a set of criteria or positions on issues that you feel are important, and you rate every individual base only on these criteria regardless of what party they belong to. If one party ranks much, much lower than the other as a whole, then so be it.Partisan means that you support a party for the sake of the party rather than for any real policy reasons.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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Unfortunately for your side, terrorists have rights, too.

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Not only that, we don't know they are really terrorists until that has been determined by examining the facts in an open court of law.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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I guess we're all waiting for you to present some evidence that the ACLU is so bad.

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The ACLU does bad things. Therefore they hate Jesus. Therefore they want to put us all in reeducation camps and sing songs praising Osama bin Laden.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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Yes, every one is entitled to a defense where an attorney will be appointed to the defendant. No complaints there whatsoever.

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Okay...

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They [the ACLU] specifically take on these cases without even knowing the facts of the case, which makes their unwaivering support suspect.

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What do the facts of the case have to do with it? Everyone is entitled to a defense. The facts of the case don't matter. Everyone is entitled to a defense. Because we don't know what the facts of the case really are until they have been examined in an open court of law.-

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The National Lawyers Guild is among some of the other groups that purposely take on cases that are, in essence, anti-American.

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Everyone is entitled to a defense.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

What I am saying is that the ACLU would be partisan if, for example, they supported any Democrat over any Republican regardless of their position on issues important to the ACLU.They are not partisan if they advocate a certain position on various issues, advocate one candidate over another consistently based on whether the candidate holds similar positions, even if this leads to, say, support for Democratic candidates over Republican candidates in the vast majority of cases.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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ACLU attorney Lawrence Speiser, acted on his own behalf that challenged a California law that required veterans to sign an affidavit stipulating that in order to receive a tax exemption, one must sign an oath of allegiance.

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So it is anti-American to want to make sure that the laws conform to the Constitution, which is supposed to be the supreme law of the land, and which places limits on the types of laws that may be enacted? I would think that trying to support the Constitution would be pro-American.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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The fact that they pick and choose which cases they want to represent coupled with the heinous nature of the crimes they take, can only mean one thing. You make the deduction.

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My deduction? That an especially heinous crime makes it difficult to find legal representation? And that the ACLU is one of the few large organizations with adequate resources that are consistently willing to take on these kinds of cases?Or that some of these cases involve significant but little explored issues of Constitutional law, and the ACLU has the relevant expertise for these types of cases?Or that the members of the ACLU hate America and everything that it stands for and strive to destroy it?I dunno, nem, which sounds like a more reasonable deduction to you]?

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

It's easy to be in favor of enforcing Constitutional protections of actions we agree with or, at least, don't find too objectionable.The true test of one's commitment to the rights protected by the Constitution is whether one is willing to defend those rights when they are used to provide protection for actions one considers especially objectionable.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

He provided a link in a previous post. The page is from the ACLU website.This thread is already redlining, so it was easy to miss (I had to hunt for it myself).

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

What don't you get? Another conservative has once again gotten his facts wrong? When have we not seen this before?Anyway, once the spin begins to take into account of undeniable fact, it will still prove that the ACLU is anti-Christian because: You know it works: evidence against the conspiracy is actually evidence for how well disciplined the conspirators are and how deep the conspiracy runs.Added by edit:
Of course, in all fairness, I'll have to admit that I am not immune to sometimes getting my facts wrong.
And I'm going to get you for this, berberry.Edited by Chiroptera, : No reason given.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

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What "Establishments" are being attacked by the ACLU?

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The Establishment-- the historical United States of America. They want their own version of the United States of America where leftist ideal can reign unchecked and unquestioned.

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(1) Times change. This is now the 21st century, and the United States is no longer a sparsely populated, rural, agriculturally base nation, seperated from the rest of the world by huge oceans, and where the quickest way to transmit messages and goods was by a really fast horse.Also, the Founding Fathers had no real idea of what a functioning democratic republic should look like. You should read their own words. They were quite aware that the principles they were laying down were based on guess work and compromises between very different visions. They themselves did not really trust the finished product -- in fact, they fully expected the next generations to correct their mistakes.Finally, we are under no obligation to become slaves to the vision of past generations. We, as a society, are free to collectively decide on how we will structure the society in which we live.-(2) Conservatives themselves show very little knowledge and less interest in actual history. The utopia they promote are ahistorical, and, like all utopias, probably unworkable in real life.-(3) Is there evidence that the ACLU promotes the "unchecked and unquestioned" acceptance of "leftist ideal", or is this another conspiracy that required the conservatives' magic crystal ball to uncover?

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

And to think I thought this thread was going to be boring.It is interesting how a rational discussion about the ACLU could proceed versus how it seems to proceed in real life: You know, I used to be conservative; it was when I realized that the typical conservative argument goes just like this that I realized you have to be deranged to be a conservative.

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This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely