Within the A.C.L.U.’s orbit, the figure most associated with the “old guard” is Romero’s predecessor, Ira Glasser, who served as the executive director of the organization from 1978 until 2001. The two men had once been close allies—Glasser had first suggested Romero, then an executive with the Ford Foundation, as a candidate to replace him. But the two had fallen out during the Bush Administration, when Romero was challenged by a faction of the A.C.L.U.’s large and famously disputatious board—a fight that Romero won. When I called Glasser, he said that he had been watching the A.C.L.U.’s election plans with mounting alarm. “There is no question that this is a transformative change in the way in which and the principles upon which the A.C.L.U. has operated from its beginning, in 1920,” Glasser said. “I regard this as a departure which has the capacity to destroy the organization as it has always existed.”
To Glasser, the idea that the organization would spend money to tell voters that one candidate for political office would defend civil liberties and the other would erode them fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between civil liberties and political power. “The problem you get into in politics is that all power is an antagonist of liberty,” Glasser said. The A.C.L.U.’s fights to protect constitutional rights had not only been against the cruel and the racist. Often, the fights had been against politicians who professed to believe in the same values the organization stood for. “Even the greatest civil libertarians are better civil libertarians before they gain power,” Glasser said. The A.C.L.U. had been a product of the progressive movement that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, yet it spent much of the twentieth century fighting the excesses of that very movement—alcohol and drug prohibition, mental hospitals, the prison as penitentiary, child welfare and foster care. “This whole progressive agenda of kindness and generosity turned out to be an enormous source of violations of civil liberty,” Glasser said. There was no greater progressive than President Franklin Roosevelt, Glasser said, and yet Roosevelt had interned Japanese-American citizens. Ed Koch had been the great hero of the Greenwich Village liberal reformers, and then, as mayor of New York City, “he was a disaster. The N.Y.C.L.U. had its hands full,” Glasser said, referring to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The liberal view is often that, if only the right people get in power, good things will happen. Glasser believes that this view is wrong, that the problem is always power itself.
I'm in agreement with Glasser, they really shouldn't be doing that.
Also in agreement with Nadine Strossen.
HATE dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. We hear too many incorrect assertions that "hate speech" -- which has no generally accepted definition -- is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm. Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials formerly wielded such broad censorship power, they suppressed dissident speech, including equal rights advocacy. Likewise, current politicians have attacked Black Lives Matter protests as "hate speech."
"Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that "hate speech" laws are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Their inevitably vague terms invest enforcing officials with broad discretion, and predictably, regular targets are minority views and speakers. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates in the U.S. and beyond maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product ... us&lang=en&#
Old guard vs new guard I guess.
