Freedom Line Blog

In an interview with CFIF, Robert Knight, senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times, discusses the most recent cases related to attempted bans on Christmas decorations, the ACLU’s threatened lawsuit over opening government meetings with a prayer and free speech versus the sound of silence.

Listen to the interview here.

You read that right.

The Daily Caller’s Caroline May reports that the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union demanded and won a ban on any public school event that limits participation to mothers and sons or fathers and daughters, such as traditional dances.

The reason: the events perpetuate “blatant gender stereotypes.”

As usual, the school sponsoring the offending dance was caught in a legal vice grip:

Although the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law does provide exemptions for such events, state law does not, but rather explicitly bans “sex discrimination in ‘…any and all school functions and activities,’” Superintendent of the Cranston Public School System Judith A Lundsten explained in an August letter sent to “Partner Organizations” and posted in full at WPRO News in R.I.

Already, one Republican candidate for Rhode Island state senate, Sean Gately, has made this a campaign issue, promising to introduce an amendment to the state law so that it tracks Title IX to allow exceptions for events like father-daughter dances.

If Gately can figure out a way to make the ACLU reimburse the school district for the hours spent in responding to this wasteful drain on public resources, he should run for governor.

Of course, the main problem with the ACLU in this and other instances is more than the waste of public resources.  It’s making a living by using the law to harass the very society the law was meant to serve.

No one who passed Rhode Island’s version of Title IX intended it to outlaw father-daughter dances.  Had the ACLU’s position been a publicly acknowledged purpose of the legislation when it was proposed, the law’s authors would have been laughed out of the chamber.  Whenever this issue gets a hearing in court – and Gately willing, it will – the reviewing court should do exactly the same to the ACLU’s argument.

Enough of the madness.  If people really want to stop making every argument political and thus polarizing, we must start by making less of our disputes a cause of legal action.

From the Washington Post:

In the first case of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union is charging that the state of Michigan and a Detroit area school district have failed to adequately educate children, violating their “right to learn to read” under an obscure state law.

The ACLU class-action lawsuit, to be filed Thursday, says hundreds of students in the Highland Park School District are functionally illiterate.

“None of those adults charged with the care of these children . . . have done their jobs,” said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan. “The Highland Park School District is among the lowest-performing districts in the nation, graduating class after class of children who are not literate. Our lawsuit . . . says that if education is to mean anything, it means that children have a right to learn to read.”

Setting aside the questionable and problematic assertion that people “have a right to learn to read” – it will be interesting to see how a court tries to enforce this – the ACLU’s frustration with underperforming public schools is shared by many.  What’s missing from its complaint, however, is any mention of how teacher union policies contribute to the problem.

Later on in the article a teacher of readers below grade level is identified as “not provid[ing] instruction while students read books on their own, or in groups, or completed self-directed work on the computer…”  Is it impossible to surmise that such behavior is protected from censure by her employment contract, the one negotiated by her union?

So far, the ACLU is suing the school district and the state, but logic demands that if you’re going to allege that “none of those adults charged with the care of these children… have done their jobs,” then someone from the Michigan Education Association needs to be included in the lawsuit’s defendant caption.

I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around.  The ACLU should make sure that the relevant teachers union gets its fair share.

National Reivew’s Victor Davis Hanson joins the call to get Eric Holder out of the Attorney General’s office with a parade of horribles similar to CFIF’s position.  With all the evils confronting American law enforcement – a drug-fueled Mexican civil war, human trafficking, and terrorist threats from naturalized citizens like Faisal Shahzad – it is stunning to think that the nation’s top prosecutor can’t seem to see his job as anything other than the highest profile assignment desk of the ACLU.

Hopefully, it won’t take an avoidable tragedy to convince President Barack Obama that Holder is a national liability as long as stays at his post.

Rising conservative Kris Kobach lays out a succinct analysis that puts to rest any notion that the Obama Administration has any legal justification for suing Arizona over its tough new illegal immigration law, and concluding with the only plausible explanation:

But even if one were to imagine that the Obama administration had a strong legal argument, there would be yet another reason not to file the lawsuit: It is completely unnecessary. Five suits have already been filed by the ACLU and their fellow travelers. The issue is already teed up for the federal courts to decide. The administration achieves nothing by launching its own litigation. Except, of course, for rallying the Democrats’ open-borders base before the 2010 elections.

In a previous part of his National Review Online entry Kobach shows that every federal appeals court who’s considered the issue “support the authority of Arizona to enact its law.”  Since the lawsuits arrayed against SB 1070 are almost guaranteed to fail, it will be interesting to see how many open-borders supporters will convince themselves that the Administration’s ploy is worth the bother.