The ACLU, from its inception, has had as its political goal a wholesale revamping of the American political/cultural landscape. It primarily functions a radical filter, straining leftwing ideas and causes into its political basket and by use of the American judicial process presses the levers of power to force socio-cultural change.

In the ACLU’s earliest forays into the world of politics and the courts, it rarely, if ever took any risks of adverse judicial rulings. Instead of directly opposing well entrenched American legal principles, it attacked rather the soft, legally unprotected, underbelly of America’s social mores agreed on by common consent in a homogeneous America. The interstitial spaces between the laws was their favorite target.

For example:

In the mid 1940’s 50’s major cities it was common for some local police precincts to act as a social agency of last resort for the homeless, the inebriated “street” people and some mentally ill who came to the precincts to get out of the cold, or because they were hungry or confused.
There were no rules permitting this, so the precincts sergeants used fictional charges of minor petty offenses (spitting on the sidewalk, vagrancy etc. disturbing the peace and the like) to allow these unfortunates into the jails and off the freezing streets for a day or two.
The ACLU pointed out that the practice had no basis in law,that without legitimat criminal charge police could not hold these people and the tradition was stopped dead in its tracks.

For example.:

In that same time period, the mentally ill were often referred to hospitals and sanitariums informally but directly by police agencies. They got medical/ psychiatric/hospital care and could live in these facilities almost indefinitely. Doctors were given great latitude in these matters. The ACLU claimed the mentally ill were being held against their will.
The courts held that only persons dangerous to the community or themselves could be detained. Many, many, thousands of mental patients were released all over the country, whether they were ready or not. Today these walking wounded can be seen on the streets of every large city in the nation.

The ACLU is the prime mover of the left radical effort to change the American’s separation between church and into a state wall against church’s everywhere. Its goal, nearly complete, is the erasure of all public evidence of religion in America by denial of equal access to the public landscape.

It is, today, one of the most well heeled organizations imaginable and enjoys near unlimited support across a broad spectrum of the left radical coalition. It is truly a nine hundred pound gorilla statue on the American front lawn.

This is not a black and white issue, but it does remind me of the detention of Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s or internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, both of which we realized were bad mistakes and not representative of what we want America to stand for.

What an great blog entry by Mr. Kalb, and a really incisive critique of the ACLU in Sandy’s comment! Chris also makes an excellent point about the dangers of unacceptible government heavy-handedness, but of course Sandy’s point was that the ACLU deliberately saw heavy-handedness where any sane individual could plainly see there was none, and through that means brought about destructive changes.

Unadorned deals well with Sandy’s reservations. One should add that many of the Japanese interned were sympathetic to the Japanese war effort; some even abetted it. We need to distinguish between the rights of citizens and the rights of foreigners in our country - while acknowledging that naturalized foreigners betray the United States just as readily as native traitors. Some Nisei citizens were Japanese agents during World War II; others served heroically with the U.S. Army in Italy. The ACLU and other outfits (especially the assorted Mexican/Hispanic and Jewish pressure groups) are doing everything they can to blur the distinction between citizenship and mere residence, just as they blur the distinction between legal resident aliens and illegal aliens. They are quite successful: among Democrats, Nancy Pelosi refers to illegal alien Mexicans as her “constituents,” while among Republicans, none other than our hapless commander-in-chief has referred to the same people as “law-abiding citizens.” In Bush’s case, maybe it’s an English comprehension problem.

At the risk of being branded nativist and racist, I must ask: Why should I, whose ancestors have been here since the early 17th century and fought for this country’s independence, give a good God-damn what anybody named Jayashri Srikantiah has to say about any American issue? Why should any American? When did (he/she?) get here? Is (he/she?) even an American citizen? HRS

I meant to say Chris’s reservations. Apologies. HRS

Dr. Roger McGrath wrote an article on the subject of the Nisei in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles. As Howard says, a good many of them were pro-Japan. Some of them were in Japan when the war started and joined the Japanese Army, sometimes as camp guards for American POW’s. Prisoners were astounded when a Japanese soldier spoke to them in English with an American accent.

One of them, who had tortured US POW’s, was spotted in the Boyle Heights section of LA in 1946. He had slipped back in the United States and was enrolled at USC. After numereous trials, appeals, and imprisonment, he was deported to Japan in 1963 after appeals from the Japanese government.

Dr. McGrath’s article goes into considerable detail on this subject.

The only way to make Bush eat his words is if there is a close election in 2004, vote for Bush’s major opponent even if the opponent is more open about his or her treason.

James Lubinskas had an excellent article on the Internments:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3570

Now I recall that the ACLU supported the Nisei Internment at the time, with only one regional office dissenting from that position. If you ever hear the ACLU claim to have been in opposition, it’s only a reference to that one lone holdout against the national ACLU.