Q&A: Nadine Strossen defends the 1997 ACLU
Defending liberty is a messy but principled business that makes enemies for the American Civil Liberties Union left and right
The New York Times ran a big piece this week on the progressive/woke turmoil inside the American Civil Liberties Union, which is not the ACLU of old or even the ACLU of 1997, when Nadine Strossen was the president. I interviewed Strossen for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when she came to town to visit her local chapter.
Defending civil liberties for all
June 8, 1997
The American Civil Liberties Union can usually be found chin-deep in the middle of the hottest political and legal waters local and national.
In Pittsburgh, the local chapter recently defended the free-speech rights of the KKK, fought Pittsburgh's teen-age curfew and filed lawsuits charging city police with a pattern of offensive behavior. Among the ACLU's dozen-plus cases now before the U.S. Supreme Court is one challenging the constitutionality of the federal government's plans to censor the Internet.
Founded in 1920, the ACLU is famously — and infamously — devoted to defending the free speech rights and other civil liberties of every American, from flag-burners and pornographers to members of the KKK .
Thanks to its longtime support of such things as abortion rights and affirmative action and its staunch opposition to prayer in school and the death penalty, the ACLU probably has as many liberal friends as it has conservative enemies.
But Nadine Strossen, national president of the ACLU since 1991, says the ACLU is praised and damned from every end of the political spectrum. Strossen flew into Pittsburgh last Saturday for a quick visit with local ACLU members and supporters.
Q: Just about everyone's heard of the ACLU, but I don't think a lot of people know exactly what it is.
A: You're right. We had to pay a high-priced consultant in Washington to find that conclusion. We have an incredibly high name-recognition, but the vast majority of people have no idea what we do or even what the initials stand for.
Q: A lot of people think it has something to do with Communists.
A: Interestingly enough, the presumption was not negative on the part of those who didn't know what the organization was. It's those who get the mail from the so-called religious right and other organizations that use us as a fund-raising mechanism. They think it's the Anti-Christian Liberties Union or the All Criminals Love Us organization.
But I think the easiest way to sum up our mission and what distinguishes us from all other organizations is that we're the only one in the country that defends all fundamental freedoms for all people. Other organizations will define themselves as defending rights of certain groups of people.
Q: When we're talking about "civil liberties," just what are we talking about?
A: I think the best known examples, the major categories, are freedom of speech, freedom of association, privacy, due-process of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion.
Q: Those sound like things that are guaranteed by the Constitution.
A: Most of those are constitutionally based, but only to a point. The Constitution, as my students are shocked to learn when they first walk into constitutional law, only protects us against government infringement on our rights.
The ACLU has never drawn that line. We have supported every civil rights law that's ever been proposed, which would extend the equality guarantee that our Constitution provides against government action to certain private action.
That's something that distinguishes us, by the way, from the libertarians of the right who agree with us on a number of issues but oppose government regulation of the private sector; even if it is regulation that says you may not discriminate on the basis of race or gender.
Q: People who have heard of the ACLU have probably heard of you in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly — defending the KKK or Nazis or communists.
A: You're absolutely right, for the reason that those cases get the most notoriety. I would slightly reformulate how you defined our role in those cases. We're not defending the Klan, per se, or the Nazis, per se. We are defending their right of free speech and their right of freedom of association. We do not support their ideas. To the contrary, those are organizations whose ideas are antithetical to civil liberties principles that we stand up for.
The reason the ACLU is controversial and our mission is often misunderstood is because people somehow equate our defense of free speech for controversial organizations with support for the substantive message that those organizations are purveying, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Q: Why is it so important for you or someone like the ACLU to defend the slimiest Internet pornographer?
A: It has to be us. There's nobody else that's doing it. If we weren't there, somebody else would have to do it, because freedom of speech only exists for any one of us if it exists for all of us.
A word we often use is indivisibility: not only freedom of speech for you indivisible with freedom of speech for somebody who strongly disagrees with you, but really all rights are indivisible with each other. If the government gets the power to suppress one right for one person, then it's going to use that power to suppress other rights of other people.
I say this not in the abstract, I say it based on historical experience and reality. In fact, I noticed in the press statement I saw on our Internet site regarding the Pittsburgh KKK case ... that the precedents that we used in order to defend free speech rights for the KKK here were precedents that resulted from civil rights cases in the 1940s and '50s, when we were defending the rights of people who were conveying exactly the opposite message on racial issues, but were as controversial in their place and in their time as, thank goodness, the KKK is controversial and unpopular now.
Q: What do you say to those conservatives who say the ACLU has a left-liberal bias?
A: Well, all they have to do is pick up The Nation magazine or some other liberal publication to see that we're equally vociferously criticized from the left for the cases we take that go against their pet causes.
Recently, for example, I got a letter from the editor of The Nation inviting me to respond to concerns from the left that the First Amendment now is only a tool of capitalists, fat-cats or tobacco advertising and people who want to pour money into campaigns.
The ACLU defends freedom of speech for tobacco advertising and the other sin industries, not to mention the Nazis and the KKK, which are hardly left-wing organizations.
We defend freedom of speech for corporations and individuals, in terms of being able to put their money where their mouth is in legislative campaigns and in campaigns for candidates and issues. That's a no-no on the left.
We oppose regulation of TV including violence, which is a big issue for the left. The left hates us for opposing those restrictions. So, for every issue or case where the right can say we think you came down wrong on our pet cause, I can match you one-for-one where the left is saying that. Which to me is a rough balance that we're getting it right in terms of neutrality.
But I have to say this: With an organization that deals with as many issues and cases as we do — thousands — there can't possibly be any thinking person who would agree that we came out correctly on every single one. That can't be the test. The test has to be, "Are we asking the right questions and are we by-and-large giving the right answers."
Q: What is the biggest threat to the civil liberties of Americans today?
A: Unfortunately, I will give the same answer to that I've given ever since I became ACLU president, because it hasn't changed. And that is, "Public apathy and public ignorance."
We are truly a democracy. We the people are the government. And we get what we deserve, in terms of all aspects of the government, including freedom of speech and all the other civil liberties the ACLU cares about. Ultimately, if people are not concerned and committed about their rights, we're going to have elected officials who trample over those rights, with nobody to stand up and defend them when they appoint judges who will not enforce the Constitution and other legal guarantees of rights.
Q: Is there a single, most important issue that the ACLU is worrying about today?
A: There are so many. At every level of government we are seeing civil liberties under siege. I will take the Internet as an example, because we have a major case in the U.S. Supreme Court on Internet censorship.
We have three cases pending in various states challenging state laws that censor the Internet. The case pending in the Supreme Court is called "Reno vs. ACLU," as in attorney general Janet Reno, which is the challenge to the Communications Decency Act, or CDA, which imposes more censorship on a medium that should be the freest communications medium in history. Yet the CDA does exactly the opposite. It makes it a crime to communicate online material that would be completely lawful if it were communicated over the telephone.
Q: How will that case turn out?
A: I'm cautiously optimistic that we are going to win that case. The justices seem very concerned about the sweeping overbreadth of this law that is going to reduce all adults to seeing a level of only what the most conservative parent would allow the youngest child to see and that's too high a price to pay, even if you do want to empower that parent. And we do want to empower all parents to enable them to screen what their children see and don't see to a certain age.
Q: Your motto at the ACLU is the Jefferson quote. ...
A: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
Q: It sounds like you folks will never run out of work. Is that true?
A: Well, it's conceivable. But every time something new happens. I get up in the morning and I hear about some instance of police brutality or somebody has an idea that we have ID cards for yet another function in our life. And I groan, and my husband says, "Look, it's giving you something to do. You're never going to run out of causes."