|
ACLU Senior Staff
Download PDF
version of this letter
October 10,
2006
To the ACLU National Board:
As the ACLU’s Senior Staff, we feel we can no
longer be silent about the recent attacks on the
ACLU and its leadership. Some of us were hired
by Anthony; some of us served for many years
under Ira. All of us are committed to the
mission of the ACLU and its core principles. We
do not believe those principles have been
betrayed or abandoned. To the contrary, we are
immensely proud of what the ACLU has
accomplished, organizationally and
programmatically, over the last five years.
Given our role on the Senior Staff, moreover, we
are in a better position than most to know that
these successes would not have been possible
without Anthony’s leadership and the support of
the Board.
These past five years have not been easy ones
for the ACLU or the country. The assault on
civil liberties since September 11th has been
severe and relentless. The ACLU has been at the
forefront of that battle in Congress, in the
courts, and in the public arena. At the same
time, we have continued to pursue a broad civil
liberties agenda that is unmatched by any other
organization. Within the past few weeks alone,
we fought back efforts in Congress to authorize
the President’s program of warrantless
surveillance after it was declared unlawful in a
federal court challenge brought by the ACLU. We
won a $500,000 jury verdict on behalf of three
Latina workers in a sexual harassment suit. We
defeated John Ashcroft’s effort to be dismissed
from a lawsuit challenging the government’s
misuse of the material witness statute as a form
of preventive detention, opening the door to his
eventual deposition. We appeared in the Ninth
Circuit defending an earlier victory striking
down Idaho’s parental consent law. We received a
disappointing decision in the California gay
marriage case but have pledged to appeal to the
California Supreme Court along with our
coalition partners. Working closely with the
Ohio affiliate, we obtained an injunction
against an Ohio law that barred naturalized
citizens from voting unless they produced proof
of citizenship. And we continue to put the
finishing touches on our third Membership
Conference, which has already attracted more
than 1,000 activists from across America, many
of whom have signed up for a lobbying day on
Capitol Hill.
It is disheartening to see those achievements
dismissed as an afterthought by those who choose
to focus instead on a handful of managerial
judgments that have been so thoroughly discussed
in recent years that there is very little now to
add to the debate. Two points, however, are
worth noting. First, while we recognize that the
Board is fully capable of defending itself, we
reject the claim that the Board has failed to
exercise its oversight role. When the Board has
disagreed with the staff – as it did, for
example, about the Ford grant - it has not
hesitated to say so. The fact that the Board has
more often agreed with the staff is not an
example of failed principle but instead of
shared principle. Second, we do not believe that
the ACLU or its leadership, including us, should
be immune from criticism. Indeed, we believe
that constructive criticism can and has helped
the ACLU to function better. But we very deeply
regret that disagreement over internal decisions
-- all of which have either been endorsed,
modified, or reconsidered through the ACLU’s
normal governance process -- has been
transformed by some into an unwarranted attack
on the ACLU’s leadership and its commitment to
civil liberties.
We support the leadership that Anthony, Nadine
and the Board have provided the ACLU. We are
confident that the ACLU is living up to its
historic role as the nation’s premier defender
of civil liberties. We know that its role is now
more vital than ever. And, one week after
Congress enacted a Military Commission Act that
strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas
corpus petitions from aliens who can be detained
indefinitely as so-called “enemy combatants,” we
look forward to the day when all our energies
can be rededicated to the genuine threats facing
civil liberties in the world today.
Caroline Fredrickson
Donna McKay
Alma Montclair
Geri Rozanski
Steven Shapiro
Emily Tynes.
[
back to top] |
