Ira Glasser
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union
Ira Glasser
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union
Only a couple of months ago your Executive Director Ira the Whiner sent me an offer of memebership in the ACLU, and I thought I made it clear than that hell would freeze over sooner than I would join your band of merry lawyers. STOP HITTING ME UP FOR MONEY AND OFFERS TO JOIN YOUR ORGANIZATION! What do I have to do to get off your mailing list? How did I get on it in the first place? I think your organization if full of tendentious windbags and yearly greater experience only confirms my opinion of the your organization. You claim to only pursue "liberty," but I have seen very clearly your organization has an "agenda" as disingenuous as that of any fundamentalist Christian group. Do I have to bring a law-suit to get my name and address removed from your database?
The below is a letter Ira Glasser of the ACLU sent to me on April 15, 1998:
Dear Friend:
You may be surprised that the Executive Director of the ACLU is writing to you on the subject of morality, rather than on law or the Constitution or some civil liberties emergency.
Well, I've decided to reach out to you and others like you because a growing struggle between two competing visions of morality is now taking place in America. This struggle should command the attention and involvement of all of us who share deep beliefs and treasure the fundamental value of individual freedom.
Freedom vs. authoritarianism. That's what the struggle over competing visions of morality is all about.
Increasingly, we are being assaulted with the belief that somehow we are a nation in steep moral decline.
Over and over we see headlines and polls which indicate that people somehow really have come to believe that we are a nation in moral decline. That something terrible happened in the sixties that loosened the wonderful moral bonds of the fifties...
...I look forward to welcoming you to the ACLU.
Sincerely,
Ira Glasser
Executive Director
Dear Ira,
Yes, I frankly am astoinished you are writing to me! How I got on your mailing list boggles my mind and makes me doubt the wisdom of the mass marketing goons from whom you obviously bought my name and address. You ask me for money in order to join the American Civil Liberties Union. Join your organization, Ira? I would rather swallow my teeth!
You mention your enemies Bennett, Gringrich, Roberston, Buchanan, et al. Mr. Glasser, let me put it plainly: You are as big a zealot and bag-of-wind as they are, just from the opposite side the political spectrum. It is because of irresponsible and immoderate proponents of radical "freedom" like yourself and small-minded "authoritarian" killjoys such as that petty tyrant Jesse Helms that the everyday citizen wants nothing to do with the affairs of state! Why people feel so alienated from the political system! Oh that we common folk caught up in the great American culture wars of the late 20th century must navegate the raging waters between the Scylla of "progressive" liberals and the Charybdis of conservative reactionaries! And the media is there all along to fan the flames and reap the ratings... a plague on both your houses!
All this hysterical ranting, Ira, about 1950s anti-homosexual and anti-birth control and anti-minority discrimination which has about as good a chance of returning to America in the 1990s as the Eisenhower jackets that were in fashion at the time... I wonder if you babyboomers (a generation of mostly failed parents and teachers!) from the 1960s are not a bunch of whiny kneejerk anti-authority paranoids stuck in a perpetual adolescence. For all their shortcomings, one looks at the 1950s and it appears the United States was at least populated by adults then instead of graying teenagers like today. I grew up (born 1967) in the sorry excuse of an American popular culture of banal rock music, mindless television programs, and execrable Hollywood movies which your generation created. This is your alternative to the 1950s? All this talk about "rights?" Too many people already regard democracy and freedom as nothing but rank license when it should be a demand and responsibility! America in 1998 as an improvement? Drugs? AIDS? Divorce? Apathy? Suicide? Drive-by shootings? Take a look around you!
Ira, I am glad the American Civil Liberties Union exists for those rare occasions when the arrogance of government need be vigorously challenged. But I can only hope the other 99 out of 100 times the courts rule sharply in your disfavor. I will hope on it. In the 99 cases out of 100, however, the country to its detriment will see itself drowned in an ocean of specious litigation on behalf of obnoxious lawyers such as yourself.
I can hardly believe the chutzpah in your asking me for money. I never ever will give your organization one single penny. Do not mail me anything again.
Sincerely,
Richard Geib
P.S. Don't call me "friend."
Nadine Strossen
President
American Civil Liberties Union
October 15, 1998
from Nadine Strossen
President of the American Civil Liberties UnionDear Friend of Freedom:
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, it is my pleasure to extend this official invitation to become a Member of the ACLU....
I would as soon become a Southern Baptist and protest as Disneyland for their homosexual policies as be a "card carrying member of the ACLU." You are as large a part of the "culture wars" which afflict this country as are they!But right now, in the never-ebbing ebb and flow of the battle to maintain freedom over authoritarianism, we need your help... I hope you will accept this personal invitation to become a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU right now.
You see, you are part of what I call the "saving remnant" of our society. Caring, thinking people who truly understand that the morality of a nation is measured not by what occurs in the privacy of our bedrooms, but by how our socity treats its people; whether or not justice and fairness prevail; whether or not a people are equal before the law; whether or not it is safe to be different in a world in which the majority rules.
As a caring and thoughtful person I have lived my adult life as a professional teacher day-in and day-out. But it is not enough to praise tolerance and esteem equality; one must try to teach what is estimable and ideal, and try to live out that example. I frankly do not care what odd people in the privacy of their bedrooms do to each other in San Francisco (ie. homosexuality) on a Saturday afternoon. I would not have anyone attacked or belittled for being "different." But neither would I support your "anything goes" point of view, as long as no law is broken. There are better and worse ideas and ways of living - not a static line of only "personal choices." Your specious argument is old-hat and I am unmoved by it; you cloak hedonism and moral relativism in the cloak of "fairness" and "justice." It is, of course, merely your opinion of what is "just" and "fair." You seem to think your opinion of what is equal and just the sine qua non of the good society (even if few others do), but I see you rather as more importunate lawyers in a spoiled country already groaning under the weight of too many professional pleaders. Founding Father John Adams wanted a nation of laws, but I doubt he would look with favor on what has become of the nation he helped to create.
