If Joseph Sobran didn’t spend so many column inches being morally superior, I would suspect him of smoking — and inhaling — improper substances. How else can one explain his periodic and highly inaccurate snits against the ACLU?
If Joseph Sobran didn’t spend so many column inches being morally superior, I would suspect him of smoking — and inhaling — improper substances. How else can one explain his periodic and highly inaccurate snits against the ACLU?
His most recent diatribe accuses the organization of “preferring” the 14th Amendment to the free speech protections of the First and thus acting as an instrumentality of “big government.”
The Fourteenth amendment protects an individual’s right to due process and equal protection of the laws. Rarely will the exercise of 14th Amendment rights conflict with the right to free speech, but one of the cases Sobran alludes to does present such a conflict. An abortion clinic had been the target of a number of illegal acts–vandalism, barricading, harassment of patients and of staff. The lower court had enjoined these acts. At the same time, the court created a “buffer zone” which required protesters to keep at least 15 feet from the clinic and its patrons at all times. The issue for those of us who care both about a woman’s right to choose and a protester’s freedom of speech is: was the buffer zone too wide? Did the lower court, in an entirely appropriate attempt to prevent illegal acts, infringe unnecessarily on the free speech rights of the protesters?
This is an issue upon which ACLU members disagree. Sobran didn’t bother to mention the (inconvenient) fact that three ACLU affiliates, Indiana among them, filed friend of the court briefs arguing that the buffer zone was, indeed, too expansive. But the larger point is that this is hardly a confrontation between big government and individual liberty; it is a fairly nuanced question involving precision in drawing a legal remedy so as to avoid inadvertent infringement of other, equally important rights.
There is a reason so many libertarians and libertarian Republicans (this writer among them) belong to the ACLU. As Sobran rightly notes, the Bill of Rights limits government action. (That is why we sue only government agencies.) What he fails to add is that these limits apply even when majorities approve of government’s actions. Your neighbors can’t vote to make you a Baptist or an Episcopalian; they cannot decide what books you may read or what movies you may see. Majorities also cannot vote to prefer white citizens over black ones, or male citizens over females. An insistence that government respect the rights of all its citizens is hardly an endorsement of “big government.”
A government that is free to pick and choose which liberties it will graciously allow us to enjoy is a government with the power to foreclose all liberty. That is why–contrary to Sobran’s assertion–we defend the entire Bill of Rights, including property rights. As this is written, the Indiana Civil Liberties Union is waiting for the Indiana Supreme Court to rule on our challenge to Indiana’s arbitrary method of assessing and taxing property.
The ACLU began by defending the right of Communists to hold stupid ideas. Today, we defend the right of people like Sobran to be equally wrongheaded. To us, it doesn’t matter how off the wall you are. What matters is your inalienable right to be wrong free of government interference.