Showing posts with label ACLU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ACLU. Show all posts
Glenn Greenwald ✒ Free speech has always been more than a Constitutional guarantee: it's also a crucial societal value. And it's more imperiled than ever.

... One of the effects of the ensuing intense controversies was that I was unable to finish an article I had been working on for months at the time: a lengthy, deeply reported examination of the internal war engulfing the ACLU, fueled by a raging conflict between its more traditional lawyers who still believe in the primacy of free speech and the need to defend it and the newer political liberal activists and lawyers who do not.

Among the people I interviewed was the organization’s long-time Executive Director, Anthony Romero, who was forced to navigate the post-Charlottesville controversy with a series of increasingly confusing statements designed to appease not only public and donor anger over the defense by ACLU lawyers of the right of white supremacists to march (after one killed a protester with his car) but also internal rage that ACLU lawyers took that free speech case. 

Romero insisted to me that the ACLU had not retreated from its historic commitment to free speech nor its resolve to avoid partisan politics despite a series of post-Charottesville memos and a highly-funded election campaign that certainly gave the opposite appearance.

Continue reading @ Glenn Greenwald.

The Ongoing Death of Free Speech ➖ Prominent ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression Of A New Book