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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (365093)	3/1/2003 4:41:53 PM
From: RON BL	Respond to of 769667

ACLU File One reason why some prominent leaders of the ACLU have been so opposed to public and private investigations of subversion must relate to what such an investigation would reveal about the Union itself. The ACLU was formed out of earlier organizations in 1920 and its Executive Director and moving spirit until 1950 was Roger Baldwin. Before he died at age 97 in 1981, his ideology may have changed, but during the early years of his ACLU tenure there is no doubt where he stood. In the "Harvard Class Book of 1935, spotlighting Baldwin's class of 1905 on its thirtieth anniversary, he was quoted as saying, "I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal." He gave this advice in 1917 to an associate who was forming another group: "Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise...We want also to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions." It should not be surprising to note that Baldwin was active during the 1930's in quite a few of the Communist Party's United Front organizations - he was an officer of the Garland Fund, for instance - along with other ACLU leaders including Rev. Harry Ward, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Scott Nearing, Robert Morss Lovett, Arthur Garfield Hayes, Archibald MacLeish, and Oswald Fraenkel. ACLU leadership also included identified Communist Louis Budenz, Robert Dunn and Corliss Lamont. ACLU activists William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn would later become leaders of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Since that time, the ACLU's official left-leaning activism has only steadily increased. Some local affiliates of the Union have always led this crusade, such as the Southern California ACLU which had maintained on its Board identified Communist Party operative Frank Wilkinson. While the national ACLU has not been characterized as a Communist front by any state or federal investigation since 1938, any doubt about its becoming a 'staunch defender' of individual rights was put to rest in April 1976, when the ACLU National Board formally reinstated Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn "posthumously" in its ranks. Despite this partisanship, the ACLU and its affiliated tax-exempt foundation continue to receive substantial yearly support from the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Field, and other foundations.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (365093)	3/1/2003 4:42:13 PM
From: RON BL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

ACLU Assaults our Intelligence Agencies Had the ACLU not been around we might not have had the tragedies in Oklahoma City or the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Perhaps the best known posturing against Big Brother on the part of the Union consists of its often bewilderingly contradictory positions on personal privacy vs. government surveillance and investigation. The ACLU provided primary leadership for the Left's drive to abolish the: House Committee on Un-American Activities(later House Internal Security Committee), Senate Internal Security Subcommittee Subversive Activities Control Board Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations Internal Security Division of the Justice Department domestic operations of Military Intelligence and the 1977 Levi Guidelines which crippled the investigative capacity of the FBI.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (365093)	3/1/2003 4:43:00 PM
From: RON BL	Respond to of 769667

ACLU Defends the Soviet Family It would be fair to say that the ACLU has contributed to the attempted undermining of the American family. They have been active in fighting for distribution of often dangerous methods of contraception and abortion to minors without parental approval. While avoiding defense of doctors who recommend nutrition to their patients, the ACLU has pushed for legalization of dangerous "recreational" drugs, not in the free market, but under government monopoly control. In the face of growing evidence of its relationship to child molestation, the ACLU is famous defending all kinds of pornography from the restrictions of local government, while sanctioning an even more intrusive and impossibly unenforceable "national standard" on obscenity and related matters. And, of course, there is the ACLU's unsuccessful support for that Pandora's box of federal power extensions that was called the "Equal Rights Amendment." In so many of these issues, which include areas in which the Union has in recent years received much publicity, the ACLU claims to be defending the rights of minors as individuals against the wishes of their parents. But when 12-year-old Ukrainian Walter Polovchak in 1980 ran away from his parents in Chicago because he did not want to be forced to return to a life of slavery in the Soviet Union, the ACLU was so moved by his parents "concern," that they took the case for the boy's involuntary repatriation. Apparently for the ACLU, an American child should be free to do anything regardless of the consequences, but a child from behind the Iron Curtain should be refused the chance for a life of freedom.