- The ACLU faced internal divisions after defending a far-right protest that devolved into a riot of hate-speech that got someone killed.
- The ACLU also argued in court that teachers, when engaging with students in their professional capacity, should respect to gender identity of students.
It seems that a subset of the ACLU has taken the stance that defending free-speech as a cloak for hate would, on balance, reduce rather than increase the rights and liberties of the broader population.
This is the classic paradox of tolerance, it is not a new situation, nor should it be mysterious, controversial, or surprising. It is something that all of us must consider in our daily lives.
Note that the shift has been quite recent (more or less since 2017) and not uniform; the ACLU does still take up free speech cases, while avoiding others, depending on various things.
Related, but not mentioned in the above articles, are tweets from prominent ACLU lawyers calling for banning certain books (see https://reclaimthenet.org/strangio-shrier-free-speech-suppre... for a reference, but this was quite widely reported). On the one hand, said lawyers have a right to their own opinions on their own personal twitter accounts. On the other hand, the ACLU never bothered to say that this opinion does not represent the ACLU organizational position....
In case it is of value to others, one such article is https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/10/26/why-the-aclu-is-rig... - it definitely has a pro-ACLU slant, but I thought it did a reasonable job of explaining the dynamics of the recent discussion/shifts within the ACLU with respect to free speech
I should make a habit of loading things in a private browsing tab as a test.
You should be able to see the whole Times article at https://web.archive.org/web/20220616003939/https://www.nytim... if you are interested in a less-pro-ACLU take.
> modern left-of-center policy in general