The American Civil Liberties Union or The American Communist & Liberals Union

“The most effective humanist organization for destroying the laws, morals, and traditional rights of Americans has been the ACLU. Founded in 1920, it is the legal arm of the humanist movement, established and nurtured by the Ethical Cultural Movement.” (Footnote #24)

I didn’t make that up.

John Dewey—“father of modern education” in America, remember?—signed the Humanist Manifesto I, was a board member of the American Humanist Association, helped establish the League for Industrial Democracy, and helped create the American Civil Liberties Union. One of Dewey’s co-founders was William Z. Foster, who had also been the head of the United States Communist Party.

But what about the ACLU founder himself, Roger Baldwin? What were his political and philosophical leanings? One hint is that on January 20, 1920, he set up in New York City the first ACLU office—in space he shared with the Communist Party’s tabloid, New Masses. In his book The Family under Siege, George Grant reports, “In 1920 he [Baldwin] also launched the Mutual Aid Society to offer financial help to leftist intellectuals, trade unionists, and the radical fringe.” (Footnote #25) Grant further recounts: “Baldwin also started the International Committee for Political Prisoners to provide counsel and support to anarchist and communist subversives who had been deported for their criminal activities. He helped to establish the American Fund for Public Service—with two million dollars donated by Charles Garland, a rich young revolutionary from Boston—in order to pour vast sums of money into revolutionary causes. And finally, he developed close institutional ties with the Communist movement and the Socialists International.” (Footnote #26)

Baldwin, Dewey, and Foster set the tone for what the ACLU would become, and today, where there is an attack on religious liberty, you can bet the ACLU is involved either directly or indirectly.

Eradicating religious freedom is only part of the ACLU agenda, though. Here is a list of “liberties” the ACLU hopes to legitimize in America:

•    Legalized child pornography

•    Abortion on demand

•    Tax exemptions for Satanists

•    Totally legalized drug use

•    Mandatory sex education for all grades

•    Legalized prostitution

•    Legalized gambling

•    Giving gays and lesbians the same legal benefits married people have

•    Letting homosexuals become adoptive and foster parents

•    Unconditional legal protection for flag-burners

•    Greater benefits for illegal aliens and homosexuals who want to enter the U.S.

And the list of liberties the ACLU opposes? Pretty much everything conservatives support:

•    Prayer in public school classrooms (as well as in locker rooms, sports arenas, graduation exercises, courtrooms, and legislative assemblies)

•    Nativity scenes, crosses, and other Christian symbols on public property

•    Voluntary Bible reading in public schools, even during free time and after class

•    Imprinting “in God we trust” on our coins

•    Access for students in Christian schools to any publicly funded services

•    Accreditation for science departments at Bible-believing Christian universities

•    The posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms or courtrooms

•    The words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance

•    School officials searching students’ lockers for drugs or guns

•    Requiring people on welfare to work in exchange for their government aid

•    Tax exemptions for Christian churches, ministries, and other charities

•    Rating movies to alert parents about sex or violence

•    Home-schooling

•    Medical safety regulations and reporting of AIDS cases

•    Public pro-life demonstrations

•    Laws banning polygamy. (Footnote #27)

If you still don’t believe the ACLU has been one of America’s most liberal and dangerous organizations from the get-go, consider the results of an investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee on Communist Activities in the United States. On January 17, 1931, the committee report said this of the ACLU, just over ten years old at the time:

The American Civil Liberties Union is closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law. It claims to stand for free speech, free press, and free assembly, but it is quite apparent that the main function of the ACLU is to attempt to protect the communists in their advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the Government, replacing the American flag by a red flag and erecting a Soviet Government in place of the republican form of government guaranteed to each state by the Federal Constitution.

Nearly four decades later, investigators from yet another source were still coming to the same conclusion about the organization. A police undercover agent, David D. Gumaer, revealed in 1969 that “206 past leading members of the ACLU had a combined record of 1,754 officially cited Communist front affiliations. . . . The present ACLU Board consists of sixty-eight members, thirty-one of whom have succeeded in amassing a total of at least 355 Communist Front Affiliations. That total does not include the citations of these individuals which appear in reports from the Senate International Security Subcommittee.” (Footnote #28)

Despite the clever name of the organization, “civil liberties” was not the real goal of Roger Baldwin. In fact, Baldwin was so committed to his radical liberalism that he was willing to use the power of governmental tyranny to “suppress” the masses and bring his worldview to bear: “When the power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. No champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it.” (Footnote #29)

As for his atheistic, communist worldview, Baldwin, by his own admission, was not an “innocent liberal.” His strategy was precise: “I joined. I don’t regret being a part of the Communist tactic, which increased the effectiveness of a good cause. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal. I wanted what the Communists wanted and I traveled the United Front road to get it.” (Footnote #30)

There you go, my friends. Roger Baldwin, the father of the ACLU and acclaimed liberal, admits he is a communist, and a communist by definition is an atheist and humanist. To accomplish his communist revolution in America, Baldwin’s tactics are as true to communism as his underlying philosophy. It is a frighteningly effective tactic liberals in general have adopted as the means by which to achieve their goals—by using lies, deception, and lots of smoke and mirrors: “We want to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a lot of flags, talk a great deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country and how that we are the fellows that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.” (Footnote #31)

While appealing to the Constitution and waving the American flag, Baldwin and his liberal friends actually trash the Constitution, defend the right to burn the flag, and persecute genuine patriots in order to achieve their goals. Baldwin said, “I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal. It all sums up into one single purpose—the abolition of dog-eat-dog under which we live.” (Footnote #32)

The approach has been stunningly successful in many ways. For instance, despite Baldwin’s hatred for the U.S. Constitution, America, God, private property, the free enterprise system, and freedom of religion, in 1981, then-President Jimmy Carter (a Democrat, in case you’ve forgotten) gave Baldwin the Medal of Freedom—our nation’s highest civilian honor.

Fortunately, not everyone is blind to the ACLU’s true intent:

Mark Campisano, former Supreme Court clerk for Justice William Brennan, has asserted, “An accounting of the ACLU’s case load suggests that the organization is an ideological chameleon—that beneath the protective coloration of civil liberties, the ACLU is pursuing a very different agenda—a very liberal agenda.” (Footnote #33)

William Donohue has said the ACLU is the very definition of liberalism: “Social reform, in a liberal direction, is the sine qua non of the ACLU. Its record, far from showing a momentary wavering from impartiality, is replete with attempts to reform American society according to the wisdom of liberalism. The truth of the matter is that the ACLU has always been a highly politicized organization.” (Footnote #34)

In concluding this review of the ACLU, I will add that, besides fronting for communism, undermining American ideals, and crusading relentlessly against the freedoms we hold dear, the organization also shows a vile level of bad taste in the causes it celebrates. To wit, in the March 1978 issue of the Skokie, the ACLU rabidly defended “the right of American Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago.” (Footnote #35)

So may I submit to you my suggestion for an alternate name to go with the initials ACLU? It may help you remember the organization’s real agenda: American Communist and Leftist Union. And they’re not alone.

Footnotes:

24 Tim LaHaye and David Noebel, Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000), 187.

25 George Grant, The Family under Siege (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1994), 145.

26 Ibid., 145; quoting Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: A Portrait (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 138–39.

27 The D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship, summer 1995.

28 LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, 188.

29 Ibid., quoting Soviet Russia Today, September 1934.

30 Grant, The Family under Siege, 146.

31 Ibid., 147.

32 Ibid., 149; quoting William Donohue, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1985), 5–6.

33 Ibid., quoting the Washington Action Alert, August 1993.

34 Ibid., quoting Donohue, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, 36.