Aclu

EVER USE this brand of shorthand? In deciding what you think of an issue, you look to see who's for it and who's against it - at least to get started. If retiring Congressmen Bob Barr and Dick Armey - or their colleague Henry Hyde - were against something, liberals would be for it. Yet the war on civil liberties - er, terrorism - has removed that simple short cut. Since Sept. 11 , Attorney General John Ashcroft has moved to put increasing numbers Americans under surveillance without benefit of court orders, harnessing new technologies to track the buying and reading habits, as well as the travel itineraries, of ordinary citizens.

Quick, what do the following people have in common: astronomer Carl Sagan, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., and former American Bar Association president Chesterfield Smith? Time's up. They're not only American Civil Liberties Union sympathizers. They're on its national advisory council! That's ACLU, in case you don't recognize it written out. George Bush is banking that voters will take his shorthand description of that organization as a bunch of left-wingers, maybe even Commies, since they're "card-carrying" types.

When Vice Pesident George Bush, before the Republican platform committee, called Gov. Michael S. Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union," he injected into the campaign a pale whiff of the witch- hunting McCarthyite '50s. How desperate Bush must be to become so shrill and so ill-advised! The accusation might be hot stuff at Yale's Skull and Bones but it's too esoteric to set Peoria ablaze, where few have ever heard of the ACLU. Does Bush think it's subversive to care enough about the First Amendment to join an organization devoted to its preservation?

Downingtown public school officials seem hellbent on bedeviling the principle of separation of church and state, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union contend. In a federal suit filed yesterday against the Downingtown schools, ACLU lawyers said permitting Christian clergy to pray at school events is unconstitutional and could make non-Christians "feel like second class citizens. " ACLU legal director Stefan Presser, in a hearing in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, initially sought to block a minister from praying or preaching at tonight's commencement exercises for Downingtown Area High School in Chester County.

DENVER - A civil-liberties group plans to provide free representation to a 35-year-old Colorado man who faces criminal prosecution and a jail sentence for giving the finger to a Colorado State Patrol trooper. The American Civil Liberties Union says the gesture may be rude, but it is protected free speech. The ACLU says Shane Boor was driving to work in April when he saw a state trooper pull over a car. As Boor passed by, he extended his middle finger in the trooper's direction.

I tremble at the thought of what America would be like without the existence of the American Civil Liberties Union. Since 1920 when it was founded, the ACLU has been one of the foremost agencies in the battle to keep the flame of freedom alive. As citizens of the freest nation in history, we owe a measure of our liberty to this organization that has existed in controversy all the years it has fought to expand the rights of individual Americans. Despite the fact that the Bill of Rights was adopted almost 130 years before the founding of the ACLU, the rights of Americans were routinely denied both by government officials and political demagogues.

Imagine a work world where bosses search their employees' desks at will. Now, imagine being a kid and dealing with things like that regularly in school. Children's rights can be dramatically different. Schools can have some control over their students' clothing, behavior, writings, e-mail, locker content and under some circumstances, can even monitor their blood for drugs. The shootings in Littleton, Colo., in April intensified many of these regulations and even spurred new ones.

An official of the American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday it appeared that the district attorney's office was handling prosecution of the Sean Daily and Stephen Crespo murder cases differently because one victim was white and the other Puerto Rican. In a letter to District Attorney Ronald D. Castille, Stefan Presser, legal director of the Philadelphia chapter of the ACLU, called on Castille to "re- examine both the charges and bail of the defendants in the Daily case. " In a letter of response, Castille denied any partiality and said, "The charges and the bail in these two cases accurately reflect individual culpability and nothing more.

The American Civil Liberties Union's name is becoming a paradox, as the organization's commitment to a robust defense of civil liberties against the government continues to diminish. Take the issue currently before the U.S. Supreme Court of whether the Boy Scouts of America have a First Amendment freedom-of-association right to exclude homosexuals. Instead of defending the Boy Scouts' right of association, the ACLU has filed a brief arguing that the government can and should compel the Boy Scouts to accept gays as Scout leaders and members.

This is about the American Civil Liberties Union and the interesting role it is playing in the presidential campaign. This is not a commentary on the virtues of the ACLU, virtues that some say are enormous; nor is it an audit of the ACLU's warts - warts that others contend are considerable. This is about the political image of the ACLU and how that image is perceived by the voters as the presidential campaign winds down to an ultimate moment of truth in November. There's an old wives' tale that suggests that in politics, perception is fact.

WASHINGTON - The public should be allowed to hear the five alleged 9/11 conspirators describe what the CIA did to them in secret overseas prisons, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a motion filed at the Guantanamo war court late Wednesday. "The eyes of the world are on this military commission," the civil liberties group wrote in its motion. It was posted on the court website uncensored and included graphic references to water torture from a leaked International Red Cross report.

HARRISBURG - Critics of the month-old voter-identification law are poised to challenge it in the courts and General Assembly. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will file suit over the law's constitutionality by the end of April, and two Philadelphia Democrats are set to introduce a bill Tuesday that would repeal the controversial measure. "There is no basis for the law in the first place. No clear fraud across the state was ever demonstrated," said Rep. Dwight Evans, who is to appear with Rep. John Myers at a news conference Tuesday at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation office at 7121 Ogontz Ave. in West Oak Lane.

WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union released records Tuesday obtained from the FBI that it said showed the bureau's San Francisco division used its Muslim outreach efforts to collect intelligence on religious activities protected by the Constitution. Under the U.S. Privacy Act, the FBI is generally prohibited from maintaining records on how people practice their religion unless there is a clear law enforcement purpose. ACLU lawyers said the documents, which the organization obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed violations of that law. After reviewing the ACLU documents, the FBI said the reports that contained notes about religious activity were appropriate because the agents were meeting with members of the Muslim community for law enforcement purposes.

DOVER, Del. - Lawyers for the City of Wilmington and the American Civil Liberties Union reached an agreement Thursday allowing the use of a downtown plaza by Occupy Delaware protesters. City officials announced the agreement hours after a judge ruled that the protesters could use Spencer Plaza as they saw fit pending a hearing Friday in a lawsuit claiming that the city is violating their rights of assembly and free speech. Under the agreement, which was approved by Occupy Delaware participants in a vote Thursday night, protesters could erect tents on two-thirds of the plaza and would not have to obtain a city permit or pay a fee. - AP  

A nearly unanimous City Council passed a new youth curfew Thursday after a long and raucous hearing dominated by often-heated testimony against the measure. The 15-1 vote sent a chamber full of opponents into chants of, "Shame! Shame!" As they filed out, they chanted, "We need schools, not the curfew. " The bill's sponsor, Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, praised those who spoke out, but said many of their concerns had been addressed in a bill the city needed.

THE NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a federal lawsuit against Philadelphia, claiming that the city's decision to deny an NAACP billboard at the airport flew in the face of the organization's First and 14th amendment rights. The billboard, which read "Welcome to America, home to 5% of the world's people & 25% of the world's prisoners" was the result of an April report by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that explored the cost of incarceration at the expense of education, according to the lawsuit.

HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania law governing DNA collection may soon get the first overhaul since it was established 16 years ago, but critics have raised concerns about the effect of a proposed change on civil liberties as well as the cost to taxpayers. A bill to mandate DNA collection from people accused of serious crimes, among other changes, passed the State Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously on Tuesday and will probably get a vote in the full Senate sometime this fall.

PITTSBURGH - A company that makes the Long Range Acoustic Device that Pittsburgh police used to control protesters during the Group of 20 economic summit two years ago disputes the scientific claims contained in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed last week. San Diego, Calif.-based LRAD Corp. wasn't named in the suit which claims a visiting college professor suffered hearing loss when the loud device was used to issue police commands and to amplify loud sounds meant to disperse protesters.

TRENTON - You've seen it on prime-time police dramas. Officers bust a drug-using high school student or low-level street dealer, then "flip" him - promising lighter prosecution in exchange for help in catching the "big fish. " But a three-year investigation, results of which were released Monday by the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, found disjointed, confusing, and, in some cases, nonexistent policies on how law enforcement agencies in the state use confidential informants.