ACLU In The News

[Shammu]

I guess National Security, means nothing to the Anti Christ Lawful Union.

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU Sponsored Debate On Wiretapping Draws Crowd


Heh! Bryan Preston at Junkyard Blog tells us about the huge groudswell of people the ACLU drew to their debate. And “very few” were swayed over to Bush’s side of the argument.

Of course thats not saying much.

    The chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office anti-terrorism task force found little support from an audience at the University of Houston-Downtown during a debate on warrantless wiretaps and the Patriot Act this week. Assistant U.S. Attorney Abran “Abe” Martinez faced questions from a half-dozen audience members Wednesday, nearly all critical of increased government powers of surveillance.

Bryan does a recount on the “half-dozen” for the liberals, and concludes that it equals six. Six moonbats, and “very few” were swayed. Stop the presses! Heh.

[Soldier4Christ]

Iran issues stark military warning to United States

Is Iran picking up on liberal talking points?

    Iran said it could defeat any American military action over its controversial nuclear drive, in one of the Islamic regime’s boldest challenges yet to the United States.

    “You can start a war but it won’t be you who finishes it,” said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards and among the regime’s most powerful figures.

    “The Americans know better than anyone that their troops in the region and in Iraq are vulnerable. I would advise them not to commit such a strategic error,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a pro-Palestinian conference in Tehran.

    The United States accuses Iran of using an atomic energy drive as a mask for weapons development. Last weekend US news reports said President George W. Bush’s administration was refining plans for preventive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

    “I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one,” General Safavi said with a grin.

    “We have American forces in the region under total surveillance. For the past two years, we have been ready for any scenario, whether sanctions or an attack.”

Blue Crab Boulevard asks: How does this get reframed exactly? I think thats a very good question, since what Iran is saying now sound so similar to what liberals have been saying.

[Soldier4Christ]

Zarqawi, al Qaeda Surrender In Iraq?


I hope this news is true.

    Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday.

    The group’s failure to disrupt national elections and a constitutional referendum last year “was a tactical admission by Zarqawi that their strategy had failed,” said Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commands the XVIII Airborne Corps.

    “They no longer view Iraq as fertile ground to establish a caliphate and as a place to conduct international terrorism,” he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

    Gen. Vines’ statement came as news broke that coalition and Iraqi forces had killed an associate of Osama bin Laden’s during an early morning raid near Abu Ghraib about two weeks ago.

Hat tip to AJ Strata who notes:

    This must be a sad day for people like Murtha, Dean and others who have been trying to be the first to surrender in Iraq. Seems Zarqawi and Al Qaeda might have beat them to the punch and given up first.

[Soldier4Christ]

OSU librarian slapped with “sexual harassment” charge for recommending conservative books for freshmen


Liberal moonbat proffessors, and colleges just can’t stand it if an opposing view point is presented to their students. First, today we learned about A professor at Northern Kentucky University leading her students to destroy an anti-abortion display. Now we learn of a case the ADF are defending.

    Officials at the Ohio State University are investigating an OSU Mansfield librarian for “sexual harassment” after he recommended four conservative books for a freshman reading program. ADF has demanded that OSU cease its frivolous investigation, yet the university is pressing forward, claiming that it takes the charges “seriously.”

    “Universities are one of the most hostile places for Christians and conservatives in America,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David French, who heads ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. “It is shameful that OSU would investigate a Christian librarian for simply recommending books that are at odds with the prevailing politics of the university.”

    Scott Savage, who serves as a reference librarian for the university, suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading in his role as a member of OSU Mansfield’s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The four books he suggested were The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.

    Savage was put under “investigation” by OSU’s Office of Human Resources after three professors filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment against him, saying that the book suggestions made them feel “unsafe.” The complaint came after the OSU Mansfield faculty voted without dissent to file charges against Savage. The faculty later voted to allow the individual professors to file charges.

    On March 28, ADF sent OSU officials a letter informing them of Savage’s constitutional rights. A copy of the letter can be read at www.telladf.org/UserDocs/OSUMansfieldletter.pdf. The university so far has declined to stop the investigation, saying in its response that it takes “any allegation of sexual harassment seriously.”

    “The OSU Mansfield faculty is attempting to label a librarian as a ‘sexual harasser’ because they disagree with his book suggestions,” said French. “It is astonishing that an entire faculty would vote to launch a sexual harassment investigation because a librarian offered book suggestions in a committee whose purpose was to solicit such suggestions.”

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU To Ask Court To Void Anti-Terror Oaths


    A civil liberties group is challenging part of a new state law after an attorney was told he wouldn’t be assigned court-appointed cases unless he signed a questionnaire stating he is not a terrorist and does not support terrorism.

    The law requires applicants under final consideration for a government job, contract or license to complete and sign questionnaires to determine if they have supported organizations on a federal list of terrorists.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio planned to ask the Ohio Supreme Court on Friday, the day the law takes effect, to exempt court-appointed lawyers from that portion of the statute. The ACLU is arguing that only the Supreme Court - not the Legislature - has jurisdiction over Ohio’s courts.

Actually this isn’t suprising.

    In October of 2004, the ACLU turned down $1.15 million in funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations because they objected to promising that none of the funds would be used to engage in any activity that promotes violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state. They got the provision scrapped after a long and vigorous fight, then accepted the funds.

It isn’t difficult to understand why the ACLU would object to such terms, after all they are defending numerous terrorists, including an individual that participated in a 15-year conspiracy to finance the group Hamas, laundering millions of dollars, some of which went to buy weapons. With the help of CAIR, they are also defending an admitted agent of Al Qaeda that has confessed to attending jihad camps in Afghanistan, and is being charged with lying to the FBI about his terror ties and activities.

    Gov. Bob Taft signed the bill Jan. 11 after the Legislature overwhelmingly approved it.

    The ACLU is acting on behalf of a lawyer in Bellefontaine who sought appointed cases from the city’s municipal court, said Jeff Gamso, the ACLU’s Ohio legal director. The lawyer refuses to do so, Gamso said.

    “What the municipal court has said is that in order to practice law as a court-appointed counsel, you have to do this thing that the Legislature cooked up,” Gamso said.

    State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a suburban Dayton Republican who sponsored the bill, said the ACLU would fail to persuade the Supreme Court.

    “It’s an argument that’s absurd on its face,” Jacobson said. “They’re saying that this interferes with the Supreme Court. All we’re doing is regulating who can be paid by the state.”

I don’t see what the problem is. The State doesn’t want its money going to individuals that might support terror. What problem does the ACLU have with not supporting terror? Why don’t they just come out and say that they do support it? What is absurd is that no one is investigating the ACLU for terror ties. Start out with one or two of its employees, and go from there.

[Soldier4Christ]

Did Clinton Give Nuke Plans To Iran?


Wow! Lots of stuff on Iran today. AJ Strata alerts me to the news Bill Clinton authorized the leaking of flawed nuke plans to Iran via the CIA during his administration. Some may be suprised that this is according to James Risen, the same Risen that leaked the NSA details.

    Last night, radio talk show host and former US Justice Department official Mark Levin shocked many listeners when he reported that President Bill Clinton gave nuclear technology to the Iranians in a harebrained scheme.

    He said that the transfer of classified data to Iran was personally approved by then-President Clinton and that the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program.

    The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran, according to a new book “State of War” by James Risen, the New York Times reporter, who exposed the Bush administration’s controversial NSA spying operation, claims the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran’s nuclear drive.

Quite a dangerous game to be playing with this kind of information, and trusting a Russian double-agent scientist who could easily fix the flaws for the right price. As a matter of fact, according to WND that just might have happened.

    But the Russian inserted a note in the package indicating he could help fix the flaws if he were paid the right price.

    But the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by sophisticated Russian nuclear scientists, the book said.

    The operation, which took place during the Clinton administration in early 2000, was code named Operation Merlin and “may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA,” according to Risen.

Absolutely reckless, and a huge risk without any obvious good side to it that would justify the risk factor involved.

    It called for the unnamed scientist, a defector from the Soviet Union, to offer Iran the blueprint for a “firing set” — the intricate mechanism which triggers the chain reaction needed for a nuclear explosion.

    …

    Risen said the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran “one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

AJ Sums it up for us:

    So much for having an obvious indicator of where the Iranians may be in their weapon design. Since this was done out of apparent stupidity it cannot be treason. But it is definitely one of the most dangerous ‘leaks’ I have ever seen. Making a pile of uranium go critical is the difference between a nuclear weapon and a pile of biohazardous material. We need to find what idiot decided to dangle the most closely held element of nuclear weapons, and what the ‘logic’ was in taking this risk.

Quite shocking news that definitely needs getting to the bottom of.

In other Iran news, Iran’s leader says Israel will be annihilated

    The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was “heading toward annihilation,” just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

    President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a “permanent threat” to the Middle East that will “soon” be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

    “Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

    Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

    On Friday, he repeated his previous line on the Holocaust, saying: “If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and have its land occupied?”

    The land of Palestine, he said, referring to the British mandated territory that includes all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, “will be freed soon.”

    He did not say how this would be achieved, but insisted to the audience of at least 900 people: “Believe that Palestine will be freed soon.”

    “The existence of this (Israeli) regime is a permanent threat” to the Middle East, he added. “Its existence has harmed the dignity of Islamic nations.”

[Soldier4Christ]

Iran Elected Deputy On The UN Commission of Disarmament:


Here is some absolute insane irony at the U.N. found thanks to Gateway Pundit.

    On Tuesday, the same day that Iran surprised the world that they may have successfully enriched enriched uranium to 3.5%, they were elected Deputy on the UN Commission of Disarmament:

    United Nations Commission on Disarmament on Tuesday elected Iran as deputy for Asian nations.

    The UN Commission opened its annual meeting on Monday which will work until April 28.

    The UN Commission on Disarmament which is subsidiary organ of the General Assembly will review disarmament and international security.
    In their first day of meetings the Commission pressed nuclear states to demolish their nuclear arms and:

    They also called on Israel to sign up to NPT and give access to all its nuclear sites for monitoring by UN nuclear agency.

And this the organization the left have faith in to resolve our dilema in a diplomatic fashion. Insanity! This makes about as much sense as having felons run the parole boards, or NAMBLA write our sex laws.

[Soldier4Christ]

Dhimmicrats Attempt To Reframe Debate On Iran

Bill Scher at the Huffington Post makes a feeble attempt to reframe the debate on Iran.

    So far, the neoconservatives have done a good job of re-running their Iraq playbook and framing discussion on Iran, by laying out these premises:
    1. Iran is close to getting nukes.
    2. Iran’s President is crazy and irrational and committed to wiping Israel off the map. He can’t be reasoned with.
    3. Bush is trying real super hard to get the UN to do something about it, but if they won’t…

    If we are to have any hope of preventing a senseless war with Iran, we cannot accept this frame. If all of the above points are reported as fact and accepted by Americans across the ideological spectrum, anti-war arguments will be seen as knee-jerk, immature and reckless, and not get a fair hearing. In turn, Democrats in Congress will get steamrolled again.

    How can we reframe the discussion? Our arguments should flow from the following framework:

    1. Iran presently has a strong, rational incentive to get nukes. …
    2. Iran has acted rationally and can be reasoned with. …
    3. There is plenty of time to negotiate. …

I’m not even going to try picking this moonbat garbage apart, when Cox and Forkum and Dan Riehl have already done such an excellent job. Of course their main point is that we can’t trust Bush. If he says the sky is blue, then it must be black. I just wanted to note how ridiculous there number 2 point is. Iran has acted rationally? When did this happen? Is it within the frame of the left to consider statements like, “Israel should be wiped off the face of the map”, and absolute refusal to listen to the international community as reasonable? Here is more of Iran’s “reasonable” actions.

    “You must bow down to the greatness of the Iranian nation”, he said, addressing the West.

    He added that if the United States continued to seek to use “bullying” tactics then “every nation of the world” would chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

The liberal moonbats with their pre-emptive anti-war attempts are laughable. Are they getting their talking points from Cindy Sheehan? Maybe we should start calling these moonbats Dhimmicrats.

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU Still Fighting To Get Radical Muslim Scholar Into U.S.


    He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the “future of Islam.”
    Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris.
    Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for Al-Qaeda activities, had “routine contacts” with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999.
    Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan.
    Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is “any certain proof” that Bin Laden was behind 9/11.
    He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as “interventions,” minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement.
    And here are other reasons, dug up by Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer doing work for some of the 9/11 families, as reported in Le Parisien:

    Intelligence agencies suspect that Mr. Ramadan (along with his brother Hani) coordinated a meeting at the Hôtel Penta in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, now in a Minnesota prison.
    Mr. Ramadan’s address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting Islamist terrorism.info from Daniel Pipes

However, the ACLU are fighting hard to get this radical inside our borders, claiming the government only revoked his Visa because he has critical views of Bush.

    The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union today urged a federal judge to lift the ban that prevents Professor Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States.

    The groups said the government is using a Patriot Act clause known as the “ideological exclusion” provision to deny a nonimmigrant visa to Ramadan, a Swiss citizen who now teaches at the University of Oxford in England.

    “The immigration laws should not be used as instruments of censorship,” said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer, who is lead counsel in this case. “The State Department should not be deciding which ideas Americans hear and which they do not.”

    The ACLU and NYCLU are seeking a preliminary ruling prohibiting the government from barring entry to Ramadan based on the ideological exclusion provision, which authorizes the exclusion of foreigners who, in the government’s view, have “endorsed or espoused terrorism.” Ramadan has repeatedly condemned terrorism in his public and written statements. The ACLU believes government officials are censoring Ramadan because he is a vocal critic of American policy in the Middle East.

The ACLU once again endanger us with their irresponsible actions.

[Soldier4Christ]

L.A. can't arrest street sleepers


LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA -- The city cannot arrest homeless people for sleeping on the sidewalks until it provides enough beds for the thousands who lack shelter each night, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

By a 2-1 majority, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that permitted the city to enforce the law at will.

The panel said the ordinance violates the Constitution's 8th Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment because the people who break it have no choice.

"I think the homeless have just found shelter with the federal courts. I think it's a brave and courageous decision," said Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

The ACLU sued the city and Police Chief William Bratton in February 2003 for enforcing it in downtown's Skid Row, an area with the nation's highest concentration of homeless people.

A federal judge dismissed the case after finding the ordinance penalized conduct, not a person's homeless status. Friday's ruling reversed that decision and sent the case back to the lower court "for a determination of injunctive relief consistent with this opinion."

Rosenbaum said the federal ruling is unique in the nation.

"There has never been a case that a community may not criminalize homelessness," he said.

Earlier this month, a blue-ribbon panel suggested building 50,000 new housing units as a way of ending homelessness.

[Soldier4Christ]

Indy law would limit molesters in public


INDIANAPOLIS — Convicted child molesters would be banned from playgrounds, swimming pools and other public places frequented by children under a proposal to be considered tonight by the City-County Council.

A new state law that goes into effect July 1 will prohibit those deemed “sexually violent predators” from living with 1,000 feet of a school or public park.

The proposed Marion County ordinance goes further, requiring anyone convicted of committing a sex crime against children to stay at least 1,000 feet from a public playground, recreation center, swimming pool, beach or sports facility when children are present. Violators would face fines from $300 to $2,500.

The proposed ordinance provides an exception for sex offenders visiting gathering places with another adult who is not an offender.

A similar ordinance in Plainfield is the subject of a pending lawsuit in Hendricks Superior Court. The ACLU of Indiana sued in December, saying the ordinance is unconstitutional.

Lafayette also has a park ban, but that ban is against a specific person who was convicted of child molesting. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld that ban in 2004.

[Soldier4Christ]

RANDOM WEAPONS CHECKS IN NYC SCHOOLS


New York City's public schools will start random weapons searches using portable metal detectors at the city's middle and high schools as soon as April 26, according to an Associated Press story. When the detectors are onsite, there will be signs alerting students to this intrusion, but on any given day, the story says, as many as 10 schools could be screened.

Justification for this measure comes from studies showing that although the crime rate has fallen dramatically, the number of weapons being confiscated is increasing, with more than 300 in this school year so far.

Issues of privacy are being raised over the decision. The story cites Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, as stating that her organization is examining the program's legality. Meanwhile, Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly predicted it would take some time for the process to work out its kinks, but said, "I think it's clear that we are on the right course to make our schools safer ... by stopping disorder before it gets out of hand."

[Soldier4Christ]

Scout's honor

The Boy Scouts of America is a private group - and as such, should be permitted to set its policies for membership however it wants.

This is the argument that the Boy Scouts and the United States Supreme Court seem to have come to some agreement on, anyway.

But critics of the organization's decisions to exclude gays and atheists from their midst wonder aloud how the Scouts can claim to be private while receiving millions of dollars in public benefits in the form of free government-building rentals for meetings and the use of Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia for its quinquennial national jamborees.

"It sounds like the Boy Scouts want it both ways. They want to be private and do what they want, and they don't want to follow the government and society in not discriminating against people - and they want the government's money," said Larry Taylor, a University of California-Los Angeles professor who has been tracking the Scouts' turns at the public trough for going on a decade now.

"They clearly want to have their cake and eat it, too," said Scott Cozza, the president of the Petaluma, Calif.,-based Scouting For All, which is working toward the reversal of the BSA's exclusionary membership practices.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also been an active participant in the battle against the Boy Scouts - and seems to have the upper hand right now with the decision of a federal court last year that the federal government's multimillion-dollar expenditures toward the congressionally chartered entity's jamborees are a violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment.

The case is currently in the appeal stage - and at least one impartial observer thinks that the Scouts could be in some trouble, legally speaking.

"The critical question in this case seems to be whether the 'duty to God' in the Boy Scout oath makes the Scouts a religious organization," said Robert O'Neil, the executive director of the Charlottesville-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

"Here, there is, curiously, no very close analogy. We know that having 'under God' on our currency, for example, has never been thought to violate the Establishment Clause. On the other hand, the requirement that someone salute the flag and recite the pledge, that's a different question - unsettled, but at least it clearly raises a different set of issues," O'Neil said.

"I would find it very hard to predict the outcome. I know it's going to be a close issue. And that uncertainty can't be sitting well with the leadership of the Scouts," O'Neil told The Augusta Free Press.

It needs to be said that most people would not think of the Boy Scouts as a religious organization - and Kent Willis, the executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, even concedes that "probably many people within the Boy Scouts don't perceive themselves as being a religious organization."

"But if you go to the Boy Scouts Web site, and begin to look at the Boy Scouts' own official statements about themselves, you see that you have to pass a religious test in order to belong. And that's the key ingredient. If the Boy Scouts were peripherally a religious organization, or there were some voluntary aspects of the Boy Scouts that had a religious flavor to them, that would not be a problem," Willis told the AFP.

Among those offering a decidedly different view on that point is Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, the party named by the ACLU in the suit that is still pending regarding the National Scout Jamboree.

"For a court to rule that because the Boy Scouts oath pledges a duty to God and country, that that somehow turns the Boy Scouts into a religious organization, so you cannot allow the federal government to provide land and services for the jamboree, we think that is just bad law under the First Amendment," McDonnell told the AFP.

"Just because a group expresses faith in God - which is shared by 95 percent of Americans - that doesn't necessarily convert a group into being a religious group that you can't give any money," McDonnell said.

"We think this is just another attempt by the ACLU to try to root out religion from the public square - and that's just, in America, we just think that's intolerable," McDonnell said.

BSA spokesperson Bob Bork couched the ACLU offensive against the Scouts - the organization has filed 14 suits related to the activities of the public-service organization since 1981 - in similar terms.

"They, for some reason, seem to think that the Boy Scouts are more threatening to civil liberties than other groups out there," Bork told the AFP. "They have defended in Virginia a nudist colony that wanted to have a camp for minor-aged children without informing their parents. They've defended the North American Man/Boy Love Association. They've defended the Nazis and their free-speech rights. But for some reason, the Boy Scouts are more threatening to civil liberties than those groups.

"It defies understanding, from our perspective. One can speculate, one, that the ACLU has been captured by the homosexual-rights movement, and so therefore they are attacking the Boy Scouts and friends of the Boy Scouts as a way of punishing us for having rights that the Supreme Court has affirmed," Bork said. "The other thing that is interesting is that they're attacking our friends. They go after our relationships with the Defense Department, with schools and school boards - and they sue those people, but they don't sue us. They think maybe that's a way of hurting us and hurting our friends for having relationships with us."

Peter Ferrara, the director of litigation at the Alexandria-based American Civil Rights Union, and a senior fellow at the Lewisville, Texas,-based Institute for Policy Innovation, offered a suggestion for the ACLU and other Scouts opponents to consider.

"The Boy Scouts have the right to decide if they have a religious requirement to join or if they have a sexual-orientation requirement to join. They have a right to decide that for themselves. If you don't like that, if you don't like the way the Boy Scouts of America run their organization, start your own organization," said Ferrara, who, like McDonnell, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf ot the Department of Defense in the jamboree case.

"And then people can make their choice - and if people like the more traditional-values system that the Boy Scouts promote, then they can join the Boy Scouts, and if they don't like it, and want a more progressive Boy Scouts system, they can join the new scouts. There are groups that are more socially conservative than the Boy Scouts who have started their own alternatives - that think the Boy Scouts are too secular and ought to be more focused on teaching religious precepts. They didn't sue anybody or demand any changes - they just went out and formed their own groups for boys," Ferrara told the AFP.

That approach is not a valid alternative at all, in Cozza's view.

"My answer to that is, then why not have black and white drinking fountains and toilets?" Cozza told the AFP. "That does not solve the problem. It actually turns our backs on our fellow human beings who are suffering."

A Maryland-based member of Scouting for All, former Boy Scout Eric Marx, said he hopes the pressure from without and within will force the Boy Scouts of America to "return to its former policies and will sort of get in line with the rest of the Scouting organizations in the Western world."

"The reason I see that is, first and foremost, membership in the Scouts is way down," Marx said, pointing to data showing that the Scouts have experienced a significant decline in their membership rolls since the late 1990s.

"They are, in many ways, becoming a pariah in many communities in the country. And frankly, they're starting to feel the bite of these lawsuits. I am fairly confident that - it won't be this year or next year, but within not that many years - the Boy Scouts will come around," Marx said.

"Boy Scouts is becoming something other than the mainstream mass-membership group that it had always been in our youth. It is now a sort of fringe sectarian group - and I don't that Boy Scouts of America will want to be in that position in the long term," Marx said.

Taylor said increased public awareness of the issues at hand involving the Boy Scouts and their public-private dilemma will play a hand to this end as well.

"The Boy Scouts want to hide for a while and not have to make a choice - and that's only possible if people don't know what they're doing," Taylor told the AFP.

"People who agree with the Boy Scouts - they can do that. And they can take the fork in the road that goes down toward being a strictly private organization. Why can't one of these clubs that discriminate against women or gays or atheists be a club? But don't expect to have your meetings on government property, for instance. That's the distinction here," Taylor said.

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU's victory is a loss for skid row


IMAGINE THAT HUNDREDS — no, thousands — of people were sleeping on the streets and sidewalks of your community every night, making it nearly impossible to walk to school or to work without being exposed to drug use, threatening behavior and other unthinkable conditions. Wouldn't you want those people to be moved immediately or risk being arrested? You bet you would.

But in downtown L.A., it's not that simple. When police began trying to enforce the law in skid row, the American Civil Liberties Union became outraged and sued the city, arguing that people have a right to sleep on the street.

The ACLU sued despite the fact that this city has financed thousands of new shelter beds in the last five years and opened thousands of permanent, supportive housing units for people with extremely low incomes. It sued despite the fact that this city is the dumping ground for most of the other municipalities in and around the county.

And it sued despite the fact that the neighborhood is working hard, with the help of the Los Angeles Police Department, to establish a sense of normalcy and to discourage behavior that would be intolerable anywhere else.

Sounds like a nutty lawsuit, right? But last week, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the ACLU, ruling that the police cannot arrest people for sleeping or sitting on public sidewalks of skid row because it would violate the 8th Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. It's cruel and unusual, the court reasoned, because there are not enough shelter beds for every one of the more than 11,000 homeless people who live in the area.

Does that make sense? What about the fact that two-thirds of our region's cities do not even allow shelters — in violation of state law — and that as a direct result, homeless people from all over are dumped on skid row?

What about the fact that many of the homeless still on the street on skid row refuse shelter for the night because they do not wish to (or are not able to) abide by the rules — including not using illegal substances or alcohol? Or that the streets of skid row at night become a free-for-all, a market for illegal and bizarre behavior that most people cannot begin to imagine?

And what about the fact that no one is arrested by the LAPD before being offered a bed for the night at a local shelter? Or that people may be taken into custody for their own protection from an environment that is dangerous and where the most common crime is transient-on-transient assault?

It's time for us to get real. We all have a responsibility to help the most unfortunate among us, and we all must step forward. But why penalize the city of Los Angeles? Why demoralize a neighborhood that is struggling to improve? Indeed, skid row already has become a place where thousands of formerly homeless and drug-addicted individuals now live stable lives alongside hundreds of working families, veterans, businesses and about 700 children.

ANYONE WHO TRULY cares about the homeless will not rejoice in the court's decision. Law enforcement is not the problem. The LAPD has never swept the streets of downtown Los Angeles clear of the homeless, nor has it tried. But some attempt to restore order is necessary. For years, the anything-goes attitude toward skid row has created a culture of lawlessness in which many people (mostly African Americans) have died.

The 9th Circuit's decision will only reinforce the view of law enforcement authorities and mental health officials from outside Los Angeles that public drunks, drug users, homeless people and those suffering from mental illness belong not in their city, but in downtown L.A.

The city of Los Angeles cannot be held accountable by itself for housing the county's entire homeless population of 88,000. The whole region needs to step up. The city of Los Angeles will always bear the lion's share of the responsibility for providing housing and homeless services. But we can't do it all.