The ACRU Blog

Dear __________________,

Thank you for your email and questions.

However, your questions betray a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Constitution actually says and does, given that you are presuming 1) that equality of outcome equals equality under the law and 2) that government-mandated political correctness over the consciences and convictions of private individuals and organizations is somehow the definition for what is "constitutional." Rather, what is constitutional is what is in accordance with the Constitution, our governing document that dictates what the federal government may do and what it must not do.

Taking your questions in order, then - and briefly:

First, discrimination is inevitable. You do it yourself every time you chose one product over another in the marketplace, or decide to befriend one individual and not another. You discriminate when you don't allow anyone and everyone free access and use of your home and property. The right of the Boy Scouts of America to determine its own moral code and impose conditions upon membership and participation in their private organization is recognized and protected by the Constitution. This is just as it is for you, me, or any other private organization.

Specifically, the right of the Boy Scouts to discriminate (i.e., determine its own membership requirements free from outside coercion) is bound up in the sanctity of private property (Amendments III, IV, & V) and its freedom of conscience (religion), speech, and assembly (Amendment I) - collectively known as the Freedom of Association - is clearly protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Second, there is no inconsistency in our support of the Boy Scouts and our stated mission to preserve equality under the law. Equality under the law simply means that everyone will be treated the same by the laws of the land, and that these laws will be applied without favor to one individual or group over another. Fundamentally, what the American Founders mainly had in mind was that our government leaders would not be free from prosecution for crimes that would most certainly lead to the average citizen being prosecuted. There is no special "above the law" status that is to be afforded to any aristocracy or specially-favored group in America. However, when a law is passed that applies to one group or individual and not another, equality of law has necessarily been violated.

Therefore, any law that "protects" a class of people from "discrimination" (especially when it does so by violating the freedom of association of another individual or organization) has introduced an inequality under the law. That these politically correct laws may be aiming for some greater equality of outcome (in someone's mind) does not alleviate this fact; to attempt to achieve this requires the subtraction of some individual's property and/or rights and the redistribution of that property and/or special privileges to individuals among the group or groups now favored by the law.

Finally, that atheists and homosexuals are barred from membership and positions of leadership with the Boy Scouts is most certainly not in conflict with our mission to preserve equality under the law for all Americans, as guaranteed by the Constitution. Private atheistic and pro-homosexual organizations - and even scouting organizations of the such - have the same rights as the Boy Scouts. Their freedom of association - to admit or not admit members and leaders under whatever criteria they should choose - receives the same protection under the law as the Boy Scouts have. We believe that is good and right, and certainly constitutional.

In conclusion, our actions in regard to the Boy Scouts of America are not hypocritical, as you suggest, but are entirely consistent with our stated mission and values.

Respectfully,

Eric Langborgh
Director of Development, The American Civil Rights Union

US District Judge Leslie Southwick comes before the Senate Judiciary Committee today on his nomination to move up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. When Judge Southwick was nominated to the District Court, his approval was unanimous. But now, the Democrat left has attacked him for being "against" homosexuals and blacks.

Both charges have to do with just two of the more than 7,000 decisions he participated in as a Judge on the Mississippi Court of Appeals. In both cases, he joined the opinion, but did not write it.

In one, the appeals court approved a trial court decision granting custody of a child to the father, rather than the mother. After a review of the mother's living conditions, the trial court ruled for the father. However, the opinion used two words, "homosexual lifestyle," which sent the Democrat left into a frenzy. This is a frivolous objection, unless one has the prejudicial view that mothers should ALWAYS win custody disputes.

In the other case, the appeals court upheld a decision of the state employment agency's decision not to fire a woman who used the "N" word once, who apologized for doing so, and whose apology was accepted. Unless one accepts the view that every slight, however small, belongs in court being settled by lawyers, this was an eminently reasonable decision.

In short, the left wants to tar Judge Southwick for using common sense in his prior judicial work. That may be a hanging offense for the left, but it is exactly what most Americans would expect from members of the federal bench.

UPDATE - BREAKING NEWS: The Democrats have now pulled the vote on Judge Southwick, and in response the Republicans have threatened to "shut down the Senate" over the issue of Democrats blocking all judicial nominees by Bush - even ones like Southwick who were unanimously approved to the US District Court just a year ago.

And now for your enjoyment at the outset of this long weekend, a few more entries in the Dictionary for the Politically Incorrect:

"Welcoming and Inclusive Attitude" = what the Establishment Clause provides if you're an Islamofascist or a Druid.

"A Strict Wall of Separation" = what the Establishment Clause provides if you're a Christian or a Jew.

"Tax Fairness" = the government's taking money away from people who earn it to give it to people who don't.

"Compassion" = the proper attitude to adopt towards those crossing the border illegally, even if it's for the tenth time.

"Accountability" = the proper attitude to adopt towards those trying to stop them.

"We Can't Balance the Budget on the Backs of ______" = any liberal constituency or interest group that wants government benefits but doesn't want to pay for them.

"A Good Haircut" = one of the things you can still buy for just $400.

"A Blank Check" = Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, sometimes previously thought to have made the President Commander-in-Chief.

"A New Direction in Iraq" = defeat. See also "surrender."

There's been a terrific response to the Dictionary for the Politically Incorrect. Many of the comments show that our readers have had considerable experience with the pseudo-language of liberalism. I say "pseudo-language" advisedly, because that's exactly what it is: The vocabulary of liberalism increasingly consists of a bunch of words from which any fixed meaning has been drained. Thus, to take but one current example, "follow a new direction in Iraq" actually means "surrender and go home," but liberals know the electorate is unlikely to buy this outcome if stated for what it is, so it has to be called something else. Hence the invention of pseudo-language.

This is the most fundamental, and most insidious, danger of the spread of the politically correct vocabulary: It's not merely dishonest, although that would be bad enough. It's that it makes serious debate -- indeed, it makes communication itself -- impossible. When words have no fixed meaning, speech becomes an anachronism. And that, even more than disguising unmarketable outcomes, is the real destination of liberalspeak. After language no longer conveys meaning, meaning will still get conveyed, only by something else. The something else will range from hecktoring, at best, to flat-out coercion at worst. And this is, in fact, what is starting to happen. From forcing your kid into sensitivity class if he says in school that homosexuality is immoral, to the escalating vandalism against campaign workers for conservative candidates, the replacement of persuasion by intimidation is already underway.

But the ACRU will continue to fight back. And in that spirit, let me offer a few more entries to the Dictionary for the Politically Incorrect:

At-risk child - An at-risk child is a 200-pound 17 year-old whose first five trips to juvenile hall had the usual effect -- namely none -- and who now is coming after you with a switchblade, most assuredly putting you at risk.

Diplomacy - Talk backed up by nothing.

Judgmentalism - The capacity to form moral judgments, this being the principal quality that gives human beings an advantage over orangutans, who after all are a good deal stronger. Nonetheless, judgmentalism is a bad thing, because the formation of judgments implies that one might correctly conclude that some ways of behaving are better than others. See "tolerance." The upshot is that only "non-judgmentalism" is an acceptable outlook on life -- with the caveat that non-judgmentalism is subject to cancellation without notice when the subject is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales, anyone invovled with the imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo, and of course the Duke lacrosse team.

Torture - Asking a terrorist what his next plan for mass murder consists of, and doing it in conditions where there is at least some chance he'll think you'd like an answer. Such conditions might include, for example, being held in an uncomfortably cold (or hot) cell, having to stand for long periods of time, being exposed to loud and unpleasant sounds, or having to sit in stress positions. None of this very closely resembles what used to be thought of as "torture," e.g., having your fingernails ripped out, being fed feet-first into the woodchipper, or being held in a dog cage while your captors ready their swords to cut your head off. But this latter collection of techniques apparently no longer qualifies as "torture," being the province of the terrorists rather than those who seek to stop them. See "judgmentalism, exceptions thereto," supra.

In all of Europe, the country that most closely mirrors America culturally -- and thus the one that may offer the most instructive lessons for us -- is Poland. Sure, we share a long cultural history with Great Britain, and we owe many of our legal traditions to them. But culturally, the closest facsimile to the United States is probably Poland.

England is not as far gone as most of the rest of Europe, but it is certainly well into its post-Christian phase. But Poland remains a strongly Christianized society. Decades of Communist oppression could not kill off the devotion of its citizens. For this reason, Ronald Reagan gave special focus to Poland, giving the Solidarity movement critical spiritual and material support. He successively utilized the burgeoning forces for freedom there as a wedge to drive into the ever widening fissures of the Warsaw Pact, which finally crumbled shortly after Reagan left office in a dramatic but largely bloodless series of events across Eastern Europe and into the former Soviet Union itself.

So it is noteworthy that the Polish prime minister and the bulk of his people have publicly declared that they will not give in to the gay agenda and the forces of political correctness that would remake Poland in the image of the rest of secularized Europe.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has come under fire from the sensitivity police for declaring Polish schools to be off-limits to proselytes of the gay lifestyle. "Such propaganda should not be in schools," he said; "it definitely doesn't serve youth well." (HT: Dan Flynn)

Last month, Kaczynski's administration announced that teachers who are promoting "homosexual culture" in schools would be fired.

The uproar from Europe's sensitivity police was predictable and immediate. The European Union's parliament passed a resolution, naturally sponsored by the Socialists, Liberals and Greens, condemning the announced policy and asking for the EU's anti-racism center in Vienna to look into "the emerging climate of racist, xenophobic and homophobic intolerance in Poland."

America's schools are afflicted by the same multiculturalist social experimentation as Poland is apparently experiencing. To cite just one recent and local example, school officials in Montgomery County, MD, have been working since 2004 to include homosexual propaganda in the district's sex curriculum, over the objections of area parents. They've been largely successful.

One wonders what pushing the homosexual agenda has to do with teaching math, science, and history? In America, academics have taken a back seat to diversity training. The Poles rightly want none of that.

So, bravo to Kaczynski for standing up to such destructive nonsense. The forces arrayed against him and his country are very similar to the forces we face here in America. We can learn from -- and our leaders should emulate -- his example. What happens in Poland will be instructive to what may soon happen here.

Eric Langborgh provides an invaluable service in setting out the history of political correctness and explaining its potential to poison the freedoms traditionally enjoyed in this country, starting but unfortunately not ending with freedom of speech. In the paper he links by Bill Lind, two points immediately struck home with me. As Lind writes:

[I]n classical economic Marxism, certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, certain groups are good - feminist women,...blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil [see, e.g., Duke lacrosse players], thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism....

"[In addition,] both [economic and cultural Marxism] have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want....For the cultural Marxist, it's deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups."

The stripping away of meaning from ordinary words is crucial to the triumph of political correctness -- and counteracting this tactic crucial to its defeat. Thus, I want to begin today with what will be a continuing project: publishing the Dictionary of Political Correctness, so that when readers see or hear a fishy phrase, they'll be clued in to what's actually going on.

Here are the first few entries in the Dictionary:

Diversity - Diversity is an outcome that (1) can't be defended on its own merit and (2) therefore has to be glommed together with a bunch of other things so that people won't notice fact (1). Thus, when an academically less qualified minority group member is given a slot in the entering class over a non-minority group member with demonstrably better academic skills, this is "justified" because, "taken as a whole," it gives the incoming class "diversity."

Multiculturalism - Multiculturalism is a big word meaning, "The West stinks." The shorthand version is, "America stinks." Under multiculturalism, George Washington, a slave-owning white male with no accomplishments of note, is out, and Che Guevara, an anti-imperialist leader, is in.

Tolerance - Tolerance is the mind-set that requires you to assume that every way of living is as good as every other way of living. Thus, if a woman has X number of kids by Y number of men, none of whom she troubled herself to get to know all that well, much less marry, we must accept this in the name of "tolerance" of a "non-traditional lifestyle." (Indeed, we are required not merely to tolerate it but foot the bill). If you are rude enough to point out that the kids who come into the world this way are much more likely to be poorly educated, not to mention abused by the next boyfriend, you are "intolerant." In bygone days, "tolerance" had a different meaning, to wit, an open attitude of good faith toward socially benevolent behavior and beliefs even if different from your own, but that view is now held principally by old fogies.

Verbal violence - Verbal violence is a statement a liberal doesn't like but has trouble refuting analytically. Thus, if you say that hard-edged feminism is at odds with traditional families -- the kind in which children usually do best -- this is "verbal violence" against women, and you have to sit in the corner (or sit out the next semester, or attend the sensitivity class, etc.).

In future blogs, I'll attempt to provide more entries in the Dictionary, and of course contributions from readers are welcome.

Ever wonder what was the impetus for the rampant political correctness that afflicts our land? Whence comes the movement that has subverted the Constitution and America's traditional values and understanding of freedom in favor of "multiculturalism," "diversity," and "tolerance"?

After all, these are important questions. The phrase, "know thy enemy," comes to mind.

I had the privilege to hear Bill Lind of the Free Congress Foundation speak on this topic a number of years ago at a conference I organized for Accuracy in Academia. As he said in that speech, titled "The Origins of Political Correctness":

The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Well, now the Free Congress Foundation has put together an informative video, embedded below, that carefuly documents the origins and history of political correctness. As Lind, the narrator of the video, explains, political correctness is a product of the morphing of economic Marxism into cultural Marxism in the early 20th century. The way these revolutionaries accomplished that -- and how they were able to mainstream their movement and beliefs -- is eye-opening, to say the least.

Lind's video does a great job diagnosing the problem. And where there is a diagnosis, a remedy can be found.

The attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union must be exhausted. It's not easy to contort one's reasoning in such a way that defends the Nazi's right to march while simultaneously supporting so-called hate crimes legislation. Perhaps a little consistency would be less hazardous to their mental health?

In recent weeks, the ACLU has come out in strong support of the American National Socialist Workers Party of Roanoke, VA -- a neo-Nazi group -- and their plan to march through a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati tomorrow. This is par for their course: the ACLU pushed for -- and won -- the landmark Supreme Court case in favor of Ku Klux Klan expression, Brandenberg v. Ohio (1969).

At the same time, the ACLU has come out in favor of new hate crimes legislation sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR). The bill -- H.R. 1592 -- would allow federal law enforcement officers to more easily investigate and prosecute so-called hate crimes.

But what crime isn't motivated by some form of hate, or at least callous indifference towards the rights, property, or life of another? Can we not just prosecute the criminal activity -- as we always have -- without making the same criminal act against given classes of people more heinous than against other classes of people?

Not according to the ACLU, whose m.o. has long been that some people are more equal than others.

In effect, the ACLU's logic concerning hate speech is this: crude, hateful speech that advocates violence and crime should be protected, but politically-incorrect, hateful thoughts or speech directly related to an actual violent crime against certain classes of people should be prosecuted, over and above the crime itself.

Got that?

A white paper submitted by the Alliance Defense Fund explains how dangerous Sen. Kennedy's hate crime bill is:

H.R. 1592 is a discriminatory measure that criminalizes thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and provides greater protection to some victims than others simply because of a status, whether chosen or inherent. The bill has the potential of interfering with religious liberty and freedom of speech as proposed, and creates additional risks for the future.

Make no mistake, that potential is real.

In 2005, Canada amended a very similar hate crimes law to protect homosexuals from "intolerance." During the two years preceding the passage of C-250, a number of lawsuits were filed against traditional Christians and Jews, with the Canadian courts generally sided against those traditionalists who spoke against the gay lifestyle and agenda. And since C-250 passed, the investigation and prosecution of Christians -- like this one -- has increased. "Hate speech" has become a "hate crime" in and of itself, even when not accompanied by criminal activity, violent or otherwise.

H.R. 1592 is bad law for a number of reasons. The tortured logic of the ACLU means that it could become even worse, proving once again that the ACLU is more interested in protecting the speech of Skinheads and Nazis than they are of devout Christians.