Political Considerations and Positions of ACLU

Mary Ellen Gale and Ramona Ripston (Letters, Sept. 3) label as “preposterous” Prof. Alan Dershowitz’s charge that the positions of the American Civil Liberties Union on civil liberties are dictated by political considerations. Their protests are arrant nonsense; Dershowitz is right.

A recent book by William Donahue, “The Politics of the ACLU,” carries an introduction by Prof. Aaron Wildavsky of the University of California, Berkeley, which exactly mirrors my feelings after more than 10 years of intense involvement with the ACLU, including seven years on its Southern California board of directors.

Wildavsky writes, “The ACLU was never what I thought it was, an organization standing up for people whose civil liberties were threatened by the passions of the time. The ACLU has always been what Donahue says it is--an organization committed to a shifting agenda of substantive policy change as dictated by the political perspectives of its most active members.”

In briefest compass, the ACLU, once devoted to achieving individual freedom from government restraint, has become a convert to advocacy of governmental compulsion to achieve equality of condition. From defense of individual differences against government, the ACLU has moved to diminish differences among people--white and black, rich and poor, young and old, authority and citizen, parent and child--the list grows all the time.

As Wildavsky says, we were naive to think that the ACLU was dedicated to some eternal verities embodied in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The traditional ACLU civil liberties have given way to securing equal conditions is regarded as unfair, undemocratic, and therefore illegitimate. That conception of democracy can justify regulation of virtually any and every aspect of life that tends toward substantive inequality. That’s a very repelling prospect.

CARL B. PEARLSTON JR.

Torrance