A Matter of Principle

When the American Civil Liberties Union celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1960, a distinguished Washingtonian sent his congratulations and commended the organization for “working together” with “the overwhelming majority” of Americans to “combat every threat to . . . sacred principles of freedom, liberty and equal justice under law.” That ringing endorsement came not from a card-carrying ACLU member but from one of the century’s most admired Republican Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower. That Eisenhower should have complimented the ACLU may come as a surprise to many Republicans, because the party’s standard-bearer in 1988 has done his best to smear the ACLU as a “far left,” semi-subversive organization that menaces basic American values.

But, as Eisenhower recognized even if George Bush does not, the ACLU has done far more to uphold American values than most U.S. Presidents and justices of the U.S. Supreme Court combined. ACLU lawyers have been caught up in the nation’s most important debates over civil rights and civil liberties. They backed schoolteacher John Scopes’ challenge of a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolutionary theory, they objected to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, they spearheaded the struggles for school desegregation and voting rights and abortion and free legal counsel.

In the process the ACLU has been both revered and reviled. Because of its dedication to “liberty and justice for all”--the same values mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance--the ACLU has taken on one unpopular cause after another. It has defended the First Amendment rights not only of civil-rights demonstrators but of Communists, Ku Klux Klan members, American Nazis and Black Panthers as well. Typically its clients are members of a minority over whom the majority is running roughshod--women, blacks, Latinos, Jews, Palestinians, draft resisters, prisoners,homosexuals, small religious sects, the disabled. If any force in this society can legitimately claim to be the defender of the underdog, it is the ACLU.

Not surprisingly, many public officials view the ACLU as a thorn in the side, a cross to be borne, a pain in the pocketbook; to vindicate constitutional rights, the ACLU has sued mayors and governors and most Cabinet agencies. Sometimes it exasperates even its supporters. Feminists object that the ACLU’s staunch opposition to censorship in any form shields pornographers. Several thousand ACLU members resigned in the late 1970s when it defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march through Skokie, Ill., a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago. Some members squirm over the ACLU’s current effort to dismiss the indictment against Iran-Contra figure Oliver L. North on grounds that his Fifth Amendment rights were trampled by the use of immunized testimony. And now ACLU card carrier Michael S. Dukakis, cowed by Bush’s attack, takes pains to point out that he disagrees with some ACLU positions, including its opposition to tax exemptions for churches.

The ACLU may not be as strictly nonpartisan as it claims; though it does not endorse candidates for public office, it was the first organization to urge the impeachment of former President Richard M. Nixon, and last year it called for the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork. As Bush insists, it may espouse more liberal than conservative causes, if by liberal one means a purist’s devotion to the Bill of Rights.

But, whatever the ACLU’s shortcomings, however one might disagree with one position or another, the ACLU is always principled. Whenever the ACLU is asked--as it often is--how it can represent malcontents and criminals and scoundrels, its standard answer is that it does not defend the person per se , but the principle; its members genuinely believe that once the government infringes any individual’s rights, everyone’s rights are endangered. We cannot imagine any idea more fundamental, more American, than that; it’s a shame that both candidates for President will not openly affirm that principle.