The ACLU’s opposition to a new Homeland Security rule, beginning January 8th, U.S. that states citizens will need valid passports to travel to (or more accurately, to travel back from) the Caribbean.
“It is an enormous constitutional question whether this puts a burden on the free movement of people through our society so as to raise whether this violates our constitutionally protected right to travel,” said Tim Sparapani, legislative council for privacy rights with the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
You see though, ACLU, foreign countries aren’t part of “our society”. At least not when it comes to whether or not passports are required to travel to and from them. That’s, um, what passports are for.
Another ridiculous ACLU argument against deterring crime at parades.
New Orleans has lots of parades. Some of them have been marred by gunfire and other shootings (which is not surprising since New Orleans had twice the crime of the national average in 2004 - no doubt it is much worse, now). To deter crime and keep parade-goers safe, the city of New Orleans had to increase the number of police officers at the parade - which means they had to increase the cost to the city. New Orleans did the next logical thing and raised the prices for having a parade in order to cover the costs of the extra police. The ACLU is now suing, saying the higher costs will infringe on free speech.
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This is my biggest problem with the ACLU. On one level, we do need to prevent the government from “taxing” people for exercising their right to speak. We can’t have the government preventing poor people from “speaking.” However, there has to be some kind of balance between the speech and some practical realities. The ACLU, inevitably, is always on the wrong side of the balancing act. Whether it’s balancing the rights of a sex offender versus the rights of the victim, or whether it’s balancing the right to “speak” in the form of a parade versus the need to keep law and order, the ACLU always picks the wrong side.
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