When presidential candidate Michael Dukakis labelled himself a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” he performed a long-overdue and stunningly significant service to the America people. With that one comment, he thrust onto newspaper front pages and TV network screens the name and ideology of a powerful, wealthy, and influential organization that has operated for decades in the shadows of our government.
We are grateful to Dukakis for bringing the American Civil Liberties Union into the limelight so we can look at its left-wing policies and its tactics of implementing them by litigating some 6,000 cases a year. They are radical elitists who work to change laws and public policies outside of the democratic legislative process.
The ACLU is the foremost defender of child pornography, which is defined as pictures and materials showing or describing sex acts involving children. The ACLY has used its legal expertise to try to cloak the peddlers of child pornography in the First Amendment, while the private parts of child victims are exposed to every obscenity devised by sadistic criminals.
It’s no wonder that donations to finance such litigation come easily from profit-making porn peddlers such as Playboy. The smut industry can afford to hire expensive lawyers.
The ACLU tries to cut itself a piece of righteous turf to stand on by sanctimoniously saying that it only defends the publication and sale of child pornography but does not defend the direct personal abuse of children. Don’t believe it. The ACLU’s Connecticut chapter is on record as having opposed efforts to cure child molesters of their evil practices.
In 1974 the maximum security prison at Somers, Connecticut, developed a program in which pictures of naked children from pornographic magazines were shown to convicted child molesters at the same time that they received a very low intensity shock from electrodes strapped onto their thighs.
The program was voluntary, and the prisoners admitted that the shocks didn’t hurt. In spit of the low intensity, the shocks produced enough unpleasantness to give the pedophiles an aversion to naked children. According to the psychologist who administered this treatment, the shock “knocks the hell out of their sexual fantasies.” In other words, the treatment cured their addiction.
After 12 weeks of this quick and inexpensive therapy, 9 out of 15 offenders were paroled. In a follow-up 11 months later, one of those treated had been rearrested for any crime, though all had previously been repeat offenders. This was a remarkable record for child-molesters, a type of criminal very difficult to reform.
The ACLU, however, called the Somers program a form of government thought-control, went on record opposing it, and then successfully sued the Connecticut Correctional Institution to stop its use of electric shock to reform sex criminals.
The ACLU is the litigating vehicle of the liberals who are soft on criminals and heartless about victims. The ACLU opposes prison terms for all but “the most serious offenses, such as murder and treason.”
The ACLU even wants prisoners, regardless of their offense, to enjoy the right to vote. It’s no coincidence that Massachusetts is one of the few states where prisoners have been given the right to vote.
The ACLU policies call for decriminalizing all deviant sexual behavior. The ACLU wants to legalize male and female prostitution and remove all state regulation so that prostitutes can move in on any neighborhood.
ACLU policies call for granting marriage licenses to homosexuals along with the same privileges that traditionally accrue to husbands and wives. Those privileges include joint income tax returns, spousal medical and retirement benefits, child custody and adoption rights, and participation in the Big Brother and foster parents programs. The ACLUE is now in court trying to deny tax-exemption to the Catholic Church because of its opposition to abortion. At the same time, the ACLU supports the right of children to have abortions without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
The ACLU wants all drugs legalized, no matter how exotic or damaging. It even wants to deny public school officials the right to search student lockers for drugs.
Since Michael Dukakis cannot deny the radical record of the ACLU, his response is to get Burt Lancaster to make TV spots saying that he, too, is “a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” That won’t help Dukakis; it will just keep the spotlight on the ACLU.
