As a PR in the process of obtaining citizenship, a small fear of mine is that USCIS will start penalizing applicants that support organizations opposed to Trump. Today just proved that anything is possible and I'm sure we've all seen the stories about CBP asking to see the social media feeds of travelers in the past.
I've been considering donating but never had until just now. I was going to give $10/mo but kicked it up to $15/mo on your behalf so you don't have to worry about donating yourself and experiencing negative consequences as a result. Good luck on obtaining your citizenship.
I was thinking the same thing. One obvious thing to do is not claim it as a tax deductible donation, since it will go into federal records, which is easily accessed by law enforcement. Getting your past credit card statements may require one more hoop to jump through for them.
Gosh.. how far have we fallen that we are seriously discussing this?
Just as an FYI, donations to the ACLU Foundation (which have somewhat more limited uses -- no lobbying, but still support litigation and other functions -- but still support the broad mission) are tax deductible.
But at https://action.aclu.org/donate-aclu it should perhaps say that, after "Contributions to the American Civil Liberties Union are not tax deductible."
ACLU and ACLUF are different organizations. ACLU can lobby and donate to politicians, which is what makes them not tax deductible. ACLUF puts restrictions on where the money can go but has tax deductible donations.
Right. And ACLU can litigate. I used to donate to a litigation fund, and donor names were published. But I've never heard about that for ACLU. I wonder what was different about that litigation fund.
It looks like you can donate by check: https://www.aclu.org/how-you-can-help, but I don't see an option for cash or Bitcoin. I suppose it could be possible to donate cash in person at one of their physical offices
The best option is to give a friend you trust cash. They, in turn can donate by proxy and that is basically how Citizens United works so it should be safe enough.
There isn't really a good way to do it on your own unfortunately.
I really hope someone from ACLU is listening in this thread and doing something about taking anonymous donations (can they even?). This is a genuine fear that many of us non-citizens have.
The ACLU has been demonized and criminalized by the right for generations. IIRC, during the McCarthy witch hunts, being an ACLU member made one suspect.
It also depends where you are, for example in New York City or in rural Texas. I heard someone tell the story that in the 1950s or 60s in a small town in the the Eastern U.S., they subscribed to the New Republic and a similar magazine using a neighbor's address so that the postman wouldn't report them.
We have the NRA to protect the 2nd amendment. The ACLU can focus on the other ones. There's no need to try and put it all under one tent: a lot of the pro 2nd amendment folks would not be happy supporting the other things ACLU fights for (separation of church and state, etc.)
Nothing precludes you from being a member of both.
I'm not sure what that has to do with criminalizing them; is that somehow illegal? By the way, an interesting website you cited. Here are the top headlines on the front page:
* Trump’s Ban of Refugees from Terror-Prone Countries Not Comparable to Holocaust
* USA Today Distorts Truth To Make Hero Gun Owner Look Bad
* STUDY: About 800,000 Non-citizens Voted for Hillary in 2016 Election
The ACLU undeniably supports Second Amendment rights. They do disagree with the Heller decision, but they don't actively oppose it. They do support the same fundamental argument behind the Miller decision that is cited by gun owners as a pro-gun rights position[0].
In their own words, they tend not to take Second Amendment cases because those are already handled by many other, much more well-funded organizations. Whereas the ACLU spends a lot of its money on causes that aren't supported by as many other groups.
[0] The Miller decision is cited by both gun rights advocates and gun control advocates for different reasons, but the part of the Miller decision from which the ACLU derives its own position is one which is fundamentally supported by gun rights advocates - the ACLU just happens to take a less expansive view of that decision.
I agree the argument upthread is weak, but your defense of the ACLU is kinda weak, too.
The ACLU's official legal stance on the 2nd Amendment is that it protects a collective right, not an individual right. And that collective right is, as a practical matter, reposed with the state. See https://www.aclu.org/other/second-amendment
In other words, the ACLU sees the 2nd Amendment as a states' rights issue. But we we all know that states' rights is a loaded term in American political discourse. It was originally coined to defend Federal laws which affirmed property interests in slaves traveling in Northern states. In other words, the issue of the day was the slave holding states' rights to pass laws defending the property rights of its slave holders. And the argument was that if those property laws could be ignored once a slave fled to a non-slave state, it effectively diminished states' rights to protect the interests of its citizens (i.e. property interests in slaves).
The biggest reason why the ACLU takes the legal stance it does is because many of its supporters support a so-called right to be free of violent crime. In particular, that means the right of local communities suffering from criminal gun violence to pass laws restricting gun rights. Initially that was a round-about way of referring to black, inner-city communities, but with the increasing attention given to gun massacres in predominantly white, suburban, areas, that "right to be free of violent crime" has become more inconclusive.
It's important to understand as a legal matter the ACLU's stance effectively advances a states' rights argument, albeit in a narrow circumstance. However, their policy explanation for why they're doing that is couched in terms of what's effectively an individual right, specifically the right to be free of gun crime.
The policy justification is arguably consistent with the ACLU's usual focus on human rights matters, but also rather inconsistent from a legal perspective in that the concept of a right to be free of [gun] crime as an excuse to limit others freedom is quite tortured. The history regarding states' rights issues, and the perpetual discriminatory treatment of minorities--specifically black minorities--by states that traditionally defend gun rights adds several layers of complexity. That complexity is important and relevant, but it doesn't justify the tortured conceptual logic of the ACLU's policy reasoning.
From a purely textual and historical perspective I think it's pretty much beyond dispute that the 2nd Amendment was about preservation of states' powers to regulate (or not regulate) guns. Many state constitutions had clauses that specifically framed it as an individual right. So, yes, gun rights were often and widely seen as an individual right in some places. But the Federal constitution was almost exclusively focused on defining the limits of when and how federal legislative powers trumped state legislative powers. So while the federal government couldn't pass laws abridging political speech, states were free to do exactly that for 150 years. That's why the 1st Amendment isn't couched in terms of an individual right, but in terms of restricting federal powers--... shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech. That's because the real issue of the day was whether the federal government could pass laws that interfered with state laws protecting _or_ restricting behavior. It's only where the Federal government was expected to have a direct and necessary relationship with an individual person (eminent domain, search & seizure, trial) where things are framed as individual, inalienable rights.
This was especially important in matters of gun rights. Because the federal government had ultimate authority to command state militias, states were afraid the federal government would limit their ability to defend themselves. The right of a state to defend itself basically boils down to the ability to prevent and suppress insurrections and rebellions, especially but not exclusively slave rebellions. Controlling that meant states needed the freedom to both protect the gun rights of some people, but also to limit the gun rights of other people, and to generally regulate guns however they saw fit. Different states might have wildly differing laws based on their circumstance. (You can sort of see how that fits the ACLU's logic of freedom from crime, but the perspective is still different--securing a state's regulatory power vs focusing on a very specific, individual "right".
But after the Civil War, and in particular the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, there began a shift of using Federal constitutional laws to limit both federal and state powers, and thus a shift toward emphasizing particular individual rights. Remember, the inalienable rights Jefferson mentioned in the Declaration of Independence were vague--life, liberty, and happiness. The next sentence says that the way to secure those vague rights was by securing the ability of men to govern themselves. It's a defense of democracy. It doesn't proscribe rules for limiting government power; on the contrary it affirms the power and legitimacy of self government to contravene pre-existing laws and limitations in order to secure individual rights as they saw fit. And in the context of a federal government, the highest concern was preserving the power of those individual state governments to address liberty issues as they best saw fit.
The Civil War finally proved how limiting that conception of government was in actuality, even though it was long theoretically understood. It proved that even well-governed democracies were prone to act in a tyrannical manner even despite their own laws. (The 14th Amendment secures the right to equal protection of the laws.) The nation wasn't yet prepared to tackle that dilemma until it became an existential issue 80 years later. But the point is, you can't read the Federal constitution in terms of individual rights. Little of the original text makes sense from that perspective. But neither can you understand and explain subsequent legal and political reasoning, and the evolution of that reasoning, without understanding the complete history.
First, I appreciate the time you took to write a thoughtful response.
Second, I wouldn't really say I'm defending the ACLU here - namely because I disagree with their stance. I won't go into why I disagree, because it's not relevant, but the point of my comment was to point out that the original argument (which comes from an incredibly right-wing website - just take a look at the front page) overstates the case that the ACLU is anti-gun.
But finally - the 'states rights' aspect of it is more complicated. The ACLU, I'll point out, doesn't use the term "states rights" (which I agree is a dog-whistle term). They refer to the right being held by the state, but unlike the specific term "states rights", that's not always a coded concept.
And I think the thing that's missing in your argument is the basic fact of where the topic of gun control actually arose in US public discourse. You do allude to it here:
> Initially that was a round-about way of referring to black, inner-city communities, but with the increasing attention given to gun massacres in predominantly white, suburban, areas, that "right to be free of violent crime" has become more inconclusive.
Simply put: gun control was not a mainstream issue until black Americans[0] started arming themselves in large numbers and (importantly) in an organized manner. That was the tipping point that brought gun control into mainstream attention, and the early organized anti-gun groups had a very noticeable (albeit coded - not always explicit) anti-black agenda.
[0] Not just the Black Panthers - even Martin Luther King Jr. was a very adamant gun owner.
Today federalism connotes an emphasis on limiting the powers of the federal government in favor of state and individual rights. Thus, the Federalist Society is a libertarian leaning political and legal membership association that promotes less regulation, and in particular emphasizes a diminishment of federal regulatory powers.
So federalist would, I think, be appropriate today. The Federalist Society is hardly non-partisan, but the terms federalist and federalism haven't [yet] become associated with any partisan political ideology. And the Federalist Society is still quite respectable, IMO. They largely maintain an earnest and honest legal and scholarly discourse, unlike many other right- and left-leaning political associations today.
> the Federalist Society is a libertarian leaning ...
The Federalist Society is establishment, movement arch-conservative. They are the legal wing of the elite, establishment conservative movement, with several Supreme Court Justices as members. If you look at the list of members here, you will see it is not libertarian or libertarian-leaning:
The federalist society and their website's published opinions look to be to be doctrainaire right wing conservatives. If you look at the about us entry of their webpage, it says individual liberty and traditional values and the rule of law.
But from the perspective of gun owners a collective/state right isn't comparable to an individual right.
Decades ago the ACLU was quite anti-gun. The only reason they got roped into the gun debate (something of a pointless distraction for them) is because of their work with minority communities, their work in helping them deal with the consequences of increasing violent crime during the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular their help in strategizing responses to state and federal laws that they thought were causative or contributive factors of that crime. The ACLU began to believe that equality couldn't be promoted merely by defending the existing panoply of liberties; that to defend civil liberties you had to arm communities with new legal tools to fight what were perceived as biased and oppressive behavior maintained in the guise of equality and liberty. (Just like the original function of the states' rights debate was to protect slavery by appeal to notions of liberty.) And part of that biased behavior was state governments ignoring the plight of some black communities wrt to gun regulation. (As you alluded to, the the prejudice is laid bare by the fact that many of same people and institutions that are today rabidly anti-gun regulation were previously very much pro-gun regulation at the height of and in direct response to the Black Panthers and black power movements, and in particular the movements for them to become armed.)
From the the ACLU's perspective, smart gun regulations could help reduce crime without imposing any undue constraints on legitimate uses of guns. The ACLU and their supporters' notions of legitimate use are clearly in opposition to that of many gun rights proponents--at least the vocal ones who managed to define the debate.
So early on the ACLU provided assistance to communities and legislators writing laws which restricted gun use. And they weren't doing it out of concern about the breadth of those laws. Rather they did so to try to make them as broad as legally and politically possible. It would be sort of like the ACLU not only defending the KKK in a free speech law suit, but helping them write their propaganda. The former defends a principle, the latter is difficult to defend by saying you're just helping them to stay within the bounds of the law.
After the conservative movement gained steamed during the 1980s and 1990s, and after it thoroughly internalized the values and legal reasoning of the rabidly pro-gun rights movement, the ACLU began to see the writing on the wall. It also helped that there always existed conflict internally about their choice to take an official legal stance and to inject itself into the debate at the cost of considerable political capital on other issues. So the past 10 or so years has seen an unwinding of the ACLUs stance and remediation of the trouble it has caused them. That unwinding includes cooperation with the NRA on blocking some federal regulations. It was a very strategic assistance, though perhaps I'm being overly cynical. But from what little I've read internally it created some serious discord because a large contingent of support inside and outside the ACLU comes from the social justice movement, for which gun regulation is a huge issue.
In the next few years don't be surprised if they just silently move away from the issue altogether. I doubt they'll ever affirm an individual right, but they don't have to affirm it. The whole issue was always a distraction from more pressing and important work. Gun violence is a real problem, but it's not something the ACLU is well-situated in any shape or form to help deal with. Better to stop antagonizing guns rights activists, especially when it feeds political divisiveness at at moment when they need all the cooperation they can find fighting for voting rights. And the focus on voting will rightly serve as a distraction for the powerful interests that kept the ACLU in the gun debate for so long.
Plus, the debate is largely over. The law of the land is that gun rights are an individual right under the Federal constitution. End of story. I may disagree with their historical reasoning and some of their legal justification, but I accept that their decision provided finality to both the legal and and political debate. There are alot of unanswered questions, but I don't think they'll be at all consequential.
And for the record, I'm not anti-gun. I'm not afraid of guns. I've shot plenty of guns, including machine guns. I'm comfortable around guns. I'd like to see more open carry and less concealed carry. IMO too many politically left-leaning people have an irrational fear of guns. And while I don't deny that gun regulation could and arguably has limited crime in some countries, I don't think it would be particularly effective nor viable in the U.S. Our gun culture is too strong to make it politically viable, and our society is too violent (criminals and police) for it to really have any effect on street level violence. More regulation won't make the violence go away. What will almost certainly make it go away is less regulation of drugs. I'm not pro-drug, either, but I'll take stepping over more passed out heroin users on the streets than having to worry about dodging bullets. I'd prefer neither, but you can't have everything.
First, I appreciate your nuanced response about the ACLU.
> IMO too many politically left-leaning people have an irrational fear of guns.
The fact that you could place the word 'irrational' in front of 'fear of guns' at all, says a lot to me about your views. I don't think I would ever mistake you for anti-gun.
As someone who is from a rural area, has also shot plenty of guns (many if not most of them assault weapons), and leans left politically; I would disagree with the assumption that more regulation would not be effective or viable in the US. It has been shown many times that a majority of gun owners[1] (and an overwhelming majority of Americans in general) support universal background checks, it's mostly only the gun lobby that keeps it from happening.
You're never going to make all the violence go away. And I agree that changing how we deal with drugs may well make a bigger difference than gun control. However, it's hard for me to come up with an argument that justifies the right of every citizen to own and carry an assault weapon. And while a total ban on all assault weapons may be extreme, I think it's hard to believe that it wouldn't result in a reduction in homicides, not to mention mass shootings where the body counts would be much lower. Gun culture too strong? We're just too violent? If this was the case you would think we wouldn't need a huge gun lobby spending millions of dollars every year to fight sensible restrictions.
The Drug War didn't work out so well. It not only didn't stop the spread of drugs, it exacerbated the problem. It made it more violent.
I'm not saying that prohibition is never a useful tool. It often is. I just don't see gun regulations lessening the problem of criminal gun violence in the American context.
There are already too many guns in this country floating around, and the ones used for criminal violations are already possessed illegally. It'd be like banning cocaine when every household in the country already has a magically self-replenishing stash. Because gun rights are firmly established--before but especially after the Heller--you'll never be able to suppress either guns or ammunition to the point where either becomes sufficiently cost-prohibitive to criminals. It's not exactly cheap now anyhow. Even handguns aren't as easy to acquire on the black market as people think, let alone assault weapons. And a black man carrying an illegal gun is basically begging for life imprisonment whether or not he ever uses it to directly hurt or even threaten someone. Yet there's plenty of people running around with illegal guns, not so much because they're easy to acquire so much as because that's the culture--that's the flip side to our obsession with gun ownership, legal or otherwise. It was always that way. Most recently we mythologized it in the Western, but it's a rare area where the brutality of the fictional imagining was less than the reality. People in this country have always been shooting each other, especially the criminals. But even when they were legal we never had had problem with military-type assault weapons, with the exception of organized crime during prohibition.
(Anyhow, I'm not saying I support allowing everybody to buy assault weapons. My point is regulation should be less of an emphasis.)
We're less violent today than we were 100 years ago, but that's not because of gun regulation. It's because people naturally moved away from it, just like people are naturally moving away from smoking. Government policies coaxed the move away from smoking with public bans and taxation. Importantly, that helped shift the culture. But nobody ever once challenged an individual's right to smoke.
We can fight the gun culture and the culture of violence without having to antagonize what are entrenched and powerful political movements. Regulation isn't even the best approach, IMO.
I think gun regulation could have a very real effect on massacres. But those numbers, while tragic, are too small. It's sickening to say, but those tragedies can't sustain the political will necessary to impose stricter laws. And in any event, the prevalence of people with mental health disorders using guns is a reflection of our gun culture. I think this is one area where violence in movies and video games truly matters. But, again, the body count isn't big enough to sustain such regulation, and such content regulation raises even bigger constitutional issues.
Relatedly, guns are a big factor in suicide in this country. Stricter regulation might actually have a very real impact there, substantially reducing body count. But it might not. What's the degree to which guns are causative? I'm amenable to accepting, in light of the preliminary evidence, that it's high degree. But the sad fact of the matter is that in our culture there's little sympathy for white men committing suicide when their own hand guns. Again, I don't see the political will capable of sustaining meaningfully effective regulation. You can't substantially address the suicide issue without restricting private ownership of handguns in your own home. Assault weapons are feasible; it's no more possible to substantially restrict handguns in homes than it is reviving slavery. Mental health checks don't help very much because we're all prone to depression, and at times far removed from when the weapons are acquired.
Regarding some liberal-leaning people being irrationally afraid of guns: I don't think it's contentious that many people unaccustomed to guns are reflexively and viscerally fearful around guns and suspicious of anyone not in a position of authority carrying a gun. Just look at the responses of people in suburban coffee shops when people carry openly, or the public commentary discussing those incidents.
I get why they're fearful. They should be to some extent. But those same people will step in front of a car while staring at their iPhone while crossing the street. Sometimes they don't have the right of way. Even if they do, sometimes the car hasn't come to a complete stop. I don't know about you, but I never walk into the path of a car until it's going slow enough that I feel I could dodge it if the driver never stopped. In downtown areas with lots of pedestrians that I might have push through, that means I don't leave the curb until every car has come to a complete stop. But few people take that very reasonable precaution. (It's a tiny risk, but an extra second of standing costs me almost nothing, and it's one of the few risks you can so easily control.) While it's not per se irrational to make a different calculation, it is irrational to be more fearful of a gun in Starbucks than the car at the intersection. Both should be feared and respected, especially when you're in control of the machine. But usually you should be more fearful of the car, not the gun, especially when the car is pointed at you and the gun isn't.
The analogy is important because if you grew up in an area with lots of guns around, you don't have that reflexive fear of guns. Familiarity makes for a comfortable coexistence, and makes it easier to think more clearly about the issue. No doubt it's easier for you to think more clearly about it, no matter the conclusions you ultimately draw. People who don't understand that are too quick to judge and dismiss gun-rights proponents as irredeemably stupid or wreckless. And that fear clouds their ability to understand how people could both want a gun and also be trusted to own and use it safely. It feeds into the divisive atmosphere. I don't think guns are some inalienable right, and I don't adhere to the legal theories that have now enshrined those rights. But that lack of fear also makes it easier for me to understand the political costs of regulation, and their viability, and you and I can quickly come to terms with our fundamental disagreement. If you feared guns and thought no sane person whatsoever would want the privilege for himself, let alone for others, to carry around a weapon in public, what would it matter how effective gun regulation would be at stopping gun violence? Just ban them and move on. But that kind of unwillingness to appreciate different cultural values is how we end up with such a divisive political culture, which ultimately empowers extremists and demagogues. Yes, most people supported and still support sensible gun regulation, including most gun owners. But because substantial numbers of a certain type of left-leaning American (white, rich, urban) weren't comfortable joining forces with centrist gun owners--couldn't bring themselves to compromise their notion that there's no legitimate justification for widespread gun possession--they laid the ground work for the current situation. Their brinkmanship has resulted so far in the worst possible legal outcomes.
I can support brinkmanship and a refusal to compromise when it comes to voting rights, or when it comes to abortion and women's bodily autonomy. Those are principles I'm willing to risk everything for. But for guns right? Given all the equivocal evidence about the complex reasons and sources of gun violence? It was pointless and stupid for liberals to be and continue to be so intransigent. Political compromise sometimes means also having to compromise closely held values. And we need to learn to be able to do that more often, especially when our reasons for sticking to our guns, so to speak, are relatively weak compared to other serious issues of the day.
>> We're less violent today than we were 100 years ago, but that's not because of gun regulation. It's because people naturally moved away from it, just like people are naturally moving away from smoking. Government policies coaxed the move away from smoking with public bans and taxation. Importantly, that helped shift the culture. But nobody ever once challenged an individual's right to smoke.
We have less smoking because of government policies which led to better awareness that smoking is really bad for you (as you say), but we do have explicit policies stopping an individual from smoking, in restaurants and businesses. That person's right to smoke up was abridged to help improve the health of others around them.
Well, you are free to be as paranoid as you like and maybe that's a good thing but no, I don't think ACLU donations are grounds for denying your naturalization application. To actually take away citizenship is even harder. You can read about the basic criteria here
but please don't come back to tell me that donating to the ACLU can be interpreted as not having "demonstrated good moral character in the years leading up to application for citizenship".
Would you also like me to not tell you that the president will sign an executive order banning people from "Muslim" countries?
I do agree that it is extremely unlikely that my citizenship will be taken away.
Being denied naturalization does not seem out of the realm of possibility with the way things are going. More specifically, I bet that the probability is high enough that making a donation to the ACLU has negative expected value.
That's not much of an argument and equating all bad things is not a very useful way to think about things (but again, you're welcome to it, it just doesn't make for much of a conversation). The president can't change laws with executive orders.
I think you are overestimating the power of laws and the strength of institutions like the courts. All those people were lynched for a century in the south, and it was illegal every time. Americans of Japanese ancestry were put in camps in WWII, no thanks to the courts. Under GW Bush, the NSA conducted illegal surveillance and the U.S. government illegally kidnapped and tortured people.
I'm not. And again, this is equating every conceivable bad thing. It's a deeply naive (never mind disempowering) way to think. Yes, governments do illegal things. Yes, of course, it's possible that the Trump or some other administration will try to constrain naturalization in some way. It's not going to be over ACLU donations, if they do.
In fact U.S. immigration / customs has a long history of testing political beliefs. The comment above makes confident statements and throws in some hyperbole, but provides no basis to believe them.
Hang on, you brought up lynchings and internment when we were talking about ACLU donations and naturalization and I am engaging in hyperbole? Also, we're not talking about immigration or customs but specifically about naturalization. Take a look at the lengthy wikipedia page
In its worst excesses, during wars, anarchist and red scares, I can't find anything in there remotely close to 'donated to ACLU, denied naturalization'. Someone even managed to get a favourable court ruling after admitting to being a communist. In 1943. What is your basis for believing an ACLU donation (not even membership, a mere donation) is going to ruin your chances of naturalization. 'The US government has done and continues to do bad things' is not sufficient basis.
As a PR in the process of obtaining citizenship, a small fear of mine is that USCIS will start penalizing applicants that support organizations opposed to Trump. Today just proved that anything is possible and I'm sure we've all seen the stories about CBP asking to see the social media feeds of travelers in the past.