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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

ACLU and EFF are two of the last few remaining "Great" American institutions - living up to America's own image of itself.

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The ACLU has had a bit of a paradigm shift recently, from "defend any speech" to "defend any speech we do not think is abhorrent". That's not necessarily a bad change, or a good change, depending on where you stand. I am just wanting to point out that the ACLU isn't necessarily "remaining", more "reinventing" these days.

Here is a fresh Glenn Greenwald writeup on it (which is just one opinion, of course):

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-s...

There's a lot of "trust me" in this article that simply isn't backed up by the ACLU's own outline of it's free speech position: https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech

It is one thing for an individual in the organization to have a nuanced view of the issue and another thing entirely for the organization to have backed off a maximalist view of the right. I encourage you to read the ACLU's position (which interestingly includes "We’ve called on big social media companies to resist calls for censorship.").

Recently the ACLU’s absolutism on free speech has begun to waver. I won’t post a link here but search for it if you want to know more.

The ACLU openly opposes the right to keep and bear arms.

https://www.aclu.org/other/second-amendment

> striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

This ruling is the crux of the matter. And ACLU's interpretation (against it) seems very logical. Sadly there's no putting the genie back in the bottle though.

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