ACLU Thrives in San Diego

One day recently, the hot topic on a local TV show was a federal judge’s ruling that the landmark crosses topping two public parks in La Jolla and La Mesa were illegal and had to come down. The show’s special guest was a visitor from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ring! Ring! Ring! At the same time, the phones at the ACLU’s San Diego office lit up with calls from TV viewers outraged at the judge’s decision--and at the ACLU’s role in the case. It had filed one of the two lawsuits that led to the ruling, telling the judge that the crosses violated the state Constitution’s ban on mixing church and state. And now it had won.

One of the callers did not mince words. “He said we were perverts and didn’t deserve to live,” said Linda Hills, the executive director of the ACLU’s San Diego affiliate.

Confounding, frustrating and bedeviling its many adversaries, the ACLU is thriving in San Diego. It is swelling with donations--at a time when chapters in nearby Southern California counties have shut down, and in a county often viewed as conservative.

It has racked up a remarkable record in recent years of big wins in high-profile court cases--the hilltop crosses, the county jails, abortion rights and free speech.

It has become a potent legal force and important community resource, its emergence mirroring the transformation of San Diego from a sheltered, politically conservative town to a diverse urban hub, the nation’s sixth-largest city.

“It’s a coming of age,” said Ed Butler, who moved to San Diego more than 30 years ago and subsequently served as city attorney, Superior Court judge and appeals court judge. “A maturity. A broadness of horizons, enlarged beyond the way things were 20 or 30 years ago in San Diego.

“It is probably reflective of the University of California’s influence in San Diego,” Butler said. “It’s probably reflective of the high-tech businesses coming here and the brains that came with those businesses. And it probably begins to say that we’re beginning to emerge, not just as a city but as a metropolitan area, a voice beginning to be heard across the country.”

It also represents a fairly remarkable turn of events, said William McGill, president emeritus of Columbia University and chancellor emeritus of UC San Diego, given the pervasive Navy influence in San Diego.

“Institutions like the ACLU came with difficulty to San Diego,” McGill said. “The ethos of this town was to accept orders from higher authority when given. And the ACLU is not cast in that mold. They tend to look for the underdog and to defend unpopular people and unmentionable topics.”

Last year, when white separatist Tom Metzger of Fallbrook was being investigated by a federal grand jury seeking access to the mailing lists compiled by his racial hatred group, White Aryan Resistance, the ACLU offered to defend his right to keep those lists secret. For the ACLU, the investigation marked a threat to Metzger’s free speech rights.

Eventually, the grand jury gave up its quest. “That was a good mark for the ACLU,” Metzger said last week.

It would be more precise, said Betty Wheeler, legal director of the ACLU in San Diego, to characterize it as adherence to principle.

“In our view, the client is not really the individual as much as it is the Bill of Rights,” Wheeler said. “It’s pretty common that civil liberties issues arise in the context of somebody who may be quite unpopular--in fact, someone whose views I may personally find abhorrent. For example, Tom Metzger.

“On the other hand,” Wheeler said, “it’s very easy to see how an erosion of Tom Metzger’s rights could the next day become the erosion of the rights of somebody whose views I very much personally agree with. So it’s important to defend those rights when those challenges occur.”

That commitment to constitutional rights has always been the ACLU’s byword.

What has changed markedly in the past few years in San Diego is how that commitment has found support in donations. It’s particularly impressive considering that the San Diego ACLU operated--literally--out of a member’s kitchen from 1964 to 1977 and did not even break off from the Los Angeles office until four years ago.

In 1985, the first year the ACLU seriously went about the business of fund-raising in San Diego, it raised $31,000, according to its figures. In 1990, it raised $156,000. Last year, it hoped to raise $166,000.

Instead, it more than doubled that goal, raking in $368,009.

It accomplished that feat without a full-time fund-raiser on staff and during the same year when the ACLU affiliate in Los Angeles closed its office in Orange County because of budget concerns. Just a few weeks ago, the Bakersfield chapter also shut down, again because of budget woes.

“There’s a story I always tell,” said Candace Carroll, a San Diego lawyer who helped lead one of the ACLU’s 1991 fund drives. “When I first moved to La Jolla, I went door to door for (1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael) Dukakis. Lo and behold, half the people on the street were Democrats. Yet they thought they were the only ones there!

“That made me realize you just can’t believe it when people tell you there are no Democrats, no liberals in San Diego,” Carroll said.

Democrats and liberals are obvious sources of ACLU support, Carroll said. So are lawyers, who last fall contributed $35,000 in a one-shot phone-a-thon.

But a total donor base of 5,000 people is evidence of a broad base of support, said Elizabeth Semel, a San Diego attorney active with Carroll in fund-raising on the ACLU’s behalf.

“I think the reason is that, when you think about a community like my hometown of San Francisco, you might find a plethora of civil liberties groups--very, very active groups,” Semel said. “In San Diego, the ACLU really stands alone.

“Of course, there are the NAACP, the Urban Rights league, organizations that are active in civil rights concerns, and I don’t mean to take anything away from them,” Semel said. “But, really, the ACLU is the stalwart. It champions the causes no one else speaks out on in San Diego because of this community’s conservative history.”

There’s also the Linda Hills factor. The executive director of the local chapter arrived in San Diego in 1984--from Hawaii, where she had been executive director at the ACLU affiliate in Honolulu--and made fund-raising a priority, reasoning that more money in the till means the ability to tackle an expanding number of issues.

She is, according to a number of people, incredibly good at conveying the ACLU’s mission to potential donors.

“People have tried to characterize the ACLU as an organization of soreheads,” Carroll said. “Linda is just the opposite of that. She is a calm, lovely, smart, low-ley person. Nobody could talk to Linda and think she was anybody but a caring, dedicated person who believed in America and the Constitution.”

The year Hills arrived, 1984, the ACLU’s budget in San Diego was $25,000. This year, it is $312,000, Hills said. “That is still less than that of most small law offices,” Hills said.

The ACLU “law office” in San Diego consists entirely of Wheeler. Frequently, she relies on volunteer attorneys for help. But it’s her load to carry, and in a daunting number of areas of law, making the ACLU’s resounding string of courtroom victories in recent months all the more meaningful.

It secured an injunction barring anti-abortion advocates from blockading San Diego medical clinics.

It convinced a federal judge that a curbside hiring ban in Encinitas trampled on the free speech rights of migrant workers seeking jobs. It persuaded an appeals court that San Diego Community College administrators had no good reason to censor a “politically sensitive” play that touched on race-related issues.

It prompted court-ordered caps on inmate counts at the county jails. A judge announced two months ago that there should also be a population cap at the county’s Juvenile Hall--another ACLU cause.

Just a few weeks ago, the ACLU won an inmate who was raped repeatedly by a homosexual cellmate in a San Diego jail the right to a trial on charges that county officials violated his civil rights by not protecting him.

And then there are the cross cases. U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. in San Diego ruled Dec. 3 that the crosses, which had stood atop Mt. Soledad and Mt. Helix for years, were illegal.

Atheist activists had challenged the Mt. Soledad cross. The ACLU challenged the Mt. Helix cross. Defenders, the city and county of San Diego, maintain the crosses are, first and foremost, historical landmarks, not religious symbols.

The case has been appealed, to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. More than any other case in recent memory, it has brought the ACLU the kind of wrath that’s a habit for the group’s affiliates in other big cities.

“They’re more aptly called the anti-Christian Luddites,” said Roger Hedgecock, the former San Diego mayor turned local radio talk show host. “They would rather destroy than allow a diversity which includes white Christian family people.”

“The ACLU is responsible for much of the problems in our society,” said Cyrus Zal, general counsel to the Encinitas-based Rutherford Institute of California, a conservative legal and lobbying group. “They protect pornography to the maximum. But they attack crosses.

“Any objective person from another planet, if there was such a thing, would come here and say they’re attacking the symbols of morality and religion. And what are they promoting? Pornography.”

Hills said criticism comes with the territory. It’s important, she said, to engage in community debates about fundamental liberties--as long as they remain, well, civil.

“This country is founded on two principles, democracy and liberty,” Hills said. “The principle of democracy says the majority should govern most political decisions. The idea of liberty is that even in a democracy, the majority doesn’t get to rule everything.

“Just because the major religions represent more people than the minor religions, that doesn’t mean the minor religions get to be denied their freedom to exercise their religion, or that their adherents get made to feel like outsiders in their community.

“In other words,” Hills said, “civil liberties require the majority to restrain itself. That’s what I think we have not been doing in San Diego apropos the cross cases. The majority is not restraining itself. But that’s vitally necessary for our liberty.”