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Comment by monochromatic | Hacker News Reader

The ACLU sometimes supports a worthy cause, but it's basically just a left-leaning political organization. I understand that's particularly trendy right now, and anyone who supports Trump is a pariah in Silicon Valley... but come on.

Would YC be donating directly to the Democratic party if that got the same favorable tax treatment?

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How are your rights 'trendy'?

I tend to stay out of politics, and don't really label people as such, but Trump is a bad guy. I'm happy to donate engineering time to the ACLU.

"Trump is a bad guy". Well OK but the ACLU does more than just fight Trump. It's possible that people have mixed feelings about those various things.

The ACLU sued to protect the rights of neo-nazis.

That's not how most "just a left-leaning political organization"s behave.

I had great respect for them when they were doing that kind of thing and standing up for everyone's right to speech. Do they still engage in that? If I recall correctly they haven't had cases like that in decades.

All their recent cases in my memory are left-leaning at least, which, while they do represent many good goals in my opinion, is understandably a political slant.

>. Do they still engage in that? If I recall correctly they haven't had cases like that in decades.

From: https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles

Some recent cases;

* The ACLU filed a motion in Michigan state court challenging the constitutionality of a subpoena issued to the website PubPeer demanding that it turn over the identities of anonymous commenters

* The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications.

* Whether a cause of action is available under the Constitution for violations of prisoners’ due process and equal protection rights when the prisoners were abused in immigration custody and when the government.

* Whether North Carolina can prohibit individuals who are registered sex offenders from “accessing” any social media websites.

* In a Freedom of Information Act request filed on January 13, 2010, the ACLU asked the government to disclose the legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones to conduct "targeted killings" overseas.

They do a lot of good work.

They definitely do, but I was speaking in particular to their more controversial actions. They've done many good defenses of politically left or fairly neutral things, but I can't think of any on the right side of the spectrum in recent memory and as someone with fairly moderate political views, that does concern me a bit.

Except for guns, I can't think of a single issue where the right is more on the side of civil liberties than the left.

There are also some things you could debate about religious freedom there too, but I'm generally in agreement.

However I'm not just talking about that, I'm also talking about them defending civil rights for everyone, not just those on the left. They used to be very good about this, standing up for protesters on both sides for example, but now I'm not so sure.

You could do what I do and perform a search to check the validity of your opinion with evidence before posting. You'd be amazed how many of my own comments I delete unfinished because a little research causes me to reconsider my first reaction.

Well said. Thank you, not only for doing the research, but for admitting that you don't always find clear support for your opinion. It takes courage and honesty. I strive to do the same, and hope that I continue to maintain that level of commitment to integrity you describe. Unashamedly plagiarizing another comment, I regret I have but one upvote to give.

Their recent (as in, last 5 years) cases include defending a Confederate veteran group, Washington Redskins, KKK, Chick-fil-A, and the Westboro Baptist Church.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/19/a-...

left-leaning?

Supporting the Constitution is left-leaning? Sign me up!

And yes they don't defend the 2nd amendment because there are already two large organizations focused on that.

> And yes they don't defend the 2nd amendment because there are already two large organizations focused on that.

I think it's accurate to say that the lawyers at ACLU have a position on the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (viewable on their website) which is not consistent with the views commonly offered by the NRA. The ACLU would only go to court to help fight a 2nd Amendment violation where they believed one existed, so that's part of the difference.

It's also not consistent with binding caselaw offered by the Supreme Court. But whatever.

I'd argue that today neither organization has a view of the 2nd consistent with current case law, which is interesting. They're both advocacy organizations, among other things, so it isn't a shocking situation.

They don't defend the 2nd amendment because they're left-leaning. Like I said.

Can you explain specifically how the ACLU is a left-leaning political organization, rather than an apolitical nonprofit?

They sue anything that looks like Christianity, that makes them "left-leaning".

Some "left-leaning" stances they take where I'm hard-pressed to see how they are defending civil rights, if not outright violating those of one party for the benefit of another:

affirmative action: https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/affirmative-actio...

voter id (are all the other countries that have this violating their citizens' civil rights?): https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

religious liberty (an employer engages in voluntary exchange... not much of a stretch to see it as a violation of rights to force them to pay for something which they consider blasphemous): https://action.aclu.org/secure/your-boss-has-no-business-you...

abortion (Roe v Wade federal overreach vs States' Rights... this and other issues like marijuana laws can be left to the States but "leftists" generally prefer a stronger central government over States as "laboratories of democracy"): https://www.aclu.org/issues/reproductive-freedom/abortion

ACA/"Obamacare": I couldn't find anything about their position on this issue but, if they were only defending civil rights rather than also being a "left-leaning political organization", I think they'd actively oppose forcing people to pay corporations for products they don't want.

I feel like you could have a good argument about most of those, but the affirmative action one is pretty damning. That's blatantly political and in no way related to constitutional protections.

There are plenty of good civil liberties related ways to look at race, but affirmative action is not one of them.

I agree that "a good argument" can be made about some of them but it appears to me that ACLU always goes "left" with such nuanced issues. If I knew of examples of them going "right" to balance things out, I'd see them differently.

For example, I tried to find out if they took a position in Kelo v City of New London to defend property rights but my searches came up empty.

>but the affirmative action one is pretty damning

The supreme court agrees that affirmative action is constitutional (within certain bounds), see the recent Fisher v. UT case, or Bakke for the original example.

"constitutional" is different from "constitutionally protected civil liberty".

Almost all laws are constitutional, but very few pertain to civil liberties.

It isn't a matter of civil liberty.

I'm not saying it's not constitutional, just that it is unrelated to civil liberties and should probably be outside their purview if they're to be a politically neutral organization.

Regarding voter ID. "All those other countries" generally uniformly issue IDs to everyone, so there's no issue like there is here in US, where there are significant minorities that don't have any form of ID. For example, I'm from Russia, and I have the government-issued ID that I need to show to vote; but that ID was issued to me for free (and is in fact mandatory to have).

A voter ID is not discriminatory in principle, provided that it's free (since otherwise it'd be a poll tax), and does not place undue burden on the citizen to obtain - like, say, traveling several hours to the only nearby place that issues them, and then waiting for several more hours in a line because it's understaffed to serve all the people that need to get their IDs from it.

The problem is that pretty much all voter ID laws promoted or passed in US to date fail these requirements, and thus effectively constitute voter suppression.

On the subject of abortion and drugs, it's fairly straightforward. ACLU is not a "states' rights" organization. It is an "individual rights" organization. It sues states for infringing people's rights as much as it sues the feds. So from their perspective, if they can enshrine the protection of a right at a federal level, they'll go for it, because it's easier than forcing all 50 states to do the same.

Yes, it may be "easier" for the ACLU to abuse/"reinterpret" the Constitution rather than work to amend it or work within its strict framework... but doing so makes things worse for more people in the longterm.

States' Rights limit the Federal Government from being so powerful that it can more easily violate civil rights... a bigger picture which ACLU should take into account.

Likewise, "legislating from the bench" may have protected some rights of individuals... but, far more often, it has "enshrined", as you say, new Federal powers at the cost of individual liberties.

Cause states rights weren't used to shield Jim Crow for a hundred years... oh, right. States just as easily trample individual rights as the federal government.

Most work that ACLU does on the federal level involves strengthening the 14th Amendment, such that it is the judicial branch of the federal government that grows stronger, specifically with respect to its power to limit infringement of individual rights by the states. That's narrow enough in scope to not be worrisome.

YC/Sam A hosted a fund raiser for the Democratic party/Obama [1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/20/president-obama-will-headl...

The ACLU has a foundation that can accept tax-deductible contributions, but it's limited in what it can do. Donations to the main ACLU, like my monthly contribution, are not tax-deductible. YC, did you give to the foundation or to the main ACLU?

The ACLU has defended the rights of neo-nazis and pedophiles. They defend people that no one wants to defend including democrats.

Recently?

Yes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/19/a-...

Which is something that can be found with a straightforward Google search, I must add, so the sheer number of comments here that are asking this question makes me conclude that most of you doing that believe the question to be rhetorical. As in, you assume that ACLU does no such thing, because "everybody knows that".

Well, "everybody" is wrong.

The murder of innocent children in or out of the womb is neither civil nor American; nor is it an expression of liberty in terms of doing what is right. But if the ACLU calls this "liberty", that is terrifying.

"There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions: he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. . . . I will not worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why. Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience."

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421961/wherever-there-a...

https://www.aclu.org/blog/ag-gag-not-just-about-animal-welfa...

Downvoted because of the false implication of favorable tax treatment. Donations to the ACLU are not deductible, though they have an associated foundation you can donate to instead: https://action.aclu.org/what-difference

The ACLU tends to not pick political sides.

This has been decreasingly true in recent years, in fairness. They've still been standing up for the principles of a liberal society consistently, but it's gotten polarized like everything else.

It only looks that way from an extreme-left perspective.

So what "extreme left" positions does the ACLU endorse?

I didn't say they were extreme left. I said they only look moderate/apolitical from an extreme-left perspective.

Ok, so what positions does the ACLU hold that you would say appear moderate from an extreme left perspective, but actually are not?

It's actually the other way around. ACLU didn't change their positions in any significant way in several decades now. But the parties and their platforms have changed such that the set of rights and liberties that ACLU promotes now has a "liberal bias", in a sense that it coincides more with the Democratic party platform than it does with the Republican party platform.

But what this tells you is that GOP platform is hostile to civil rights, not that ACLU became partisan.

It only looks that way from an extreme-left perspective.

Which only appears to be "extreme left" if you're coming from a, well... (nevermind) perspective.

The point is, yeah, everyone has a perspective (and yes, biases). Which is a good thing, by and large.

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