The ACLU Should Stop Pretending To Care About Civil Rights

(AP Photo/Philip Kamrass, File)

The ACLU has long ignored the Second Amendment. Some have argued that since there are groups defending our Second Amendment rights, the ACLU was justified in focusing on our other rights.

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I don’t buy it, but fine.

However, ignoring it is preferable to actively attacking it, which is what the ACLU has recently tried. It’s enough that NSSF’s Larry Keane is calling for the organization to quit pretending it cares about civil liberties at all.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) needs to change their name. At this point, it’s false advertising.

The ACLU recently argued that, “anti-Blackness determined the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and has informed the unequal and racist application of gun laws.” That’s plainly arguing that the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights as a tool of racist control of slaves. The posting by communications intern Ines Santos was an introduction to a podcast that included opinions from several professors who wholeheartedly agree the Second Amendment is racist and is a tool to deny civil rights to African-Americans.

It’s clear the ACLU is a shadow of its former self. It’s not the bastion to protect God-given liberties, but to drive special interest agendas. The ACLU’s disdain for the Second Amendment as a foundational and individual right isn’t new, but it is an attempt to flip it on its head. The ACLU‘s argument that the Second Amendment is a tool of oppressors doesn’t just ignore history. It is rewriting cold, hard facts.

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He’s not wrong, of course. I blasted the ACLU myself earlier this week, so I’m not a fan of this recent incarnation of the organization.

Once upon a time, I’d have been the kind of guy with an NRA membership and an ACLU membership. Civil liberties matter to me. All of them, not just the ones I find convenient or enjoyable. For me, feeling that way means I defend the rights of people who I find morally repugnant. Once upon a time, the ACLU was like that, too.

Those days are over, though.

Keane called the ACLU out over their attack on the Second Amendment, but others have pointed out how the group has basically attacked other civil liberties, too.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed in 1920 ‘to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States’.

However, it has strayed far from its original purpose, morphing into just another ‘progressive’ advocacy group. It has turned its back on individual rights and liberties, backing away from protecting the First Amendment. Now, it is actively targeting the Second Amendment, which it believes is racist.

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Now, this is the same ACLU that defended neo-Nazis wanting to mark in Skokie, Illinois.

Well, not the same. This one is very different. No longer do they care about civil liberties. Now they simply push whatever the progressives seem to want and provide cover, claiming things like raising the age when people can buy guns doesn’t violate civil rights.

Gone are the days when the ACLU stood for people’s rights, even those who they despised and who returned that opinion in kind. Now, they’re just a rubber stamp on whatever progressive activists want anymore.

As such, I agree with Keane. They really need to stop pretending.

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