The Nazi rally in Charlottesville and the violence of it were a product of the legal profession and members of the judiciary. They permitted it to go on. They are not, though, the ones who are taking heat for a situation they created.
When will the ACLU and other lawyers, the judges and justices who are the ones who created the nightmare scenario in which police have to try to keep NAZIS LEGALLY CARRYING AUTOMATIC WEAPONS and others contained. What if a policeman had had to discharge his or her weapon on someone who was about to kill someone. With all of those people in that state of frenzy, some of them reportedly carrying higher capacity weapons than the police, there could have been a complete and total blood bath on the streets with who knows how many dead?
It's decades past the time that the ACLU, the Rutherford Institute and other law shops who go to court to let people own and carry automatic weapons and Nazi marches to have to pay a price for their part in this. The impunity from investigation and criticism of them because they happen to have a license to practice law is one of the stupidest habits of non-thinking we have.
The ACLU has got blood on its hands, its clean fingernails and suits and ties doesn't change the fact that they and their legal brethren are the ones who have enabled this to happen.
I read the article at Slate which is being linked to all over which says Charlottesville showed that our First Amendment jurisprudence hasn’t reckoned with our Second Amendment reality, and kept asking myself why should they bother catching up when there is no price to pay for the part that the legal profession and the judiciary in creating this nightmare.
It was particularly galling to me to read Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write:
Most civil libertarians (us included) believe the court got the Skokie case right. But it’s increasingly clear that Skokie can’t always help courts figure out how to deal with a post-Heller, post–“stand your ground” white nationalist protest. Whatever the courts were attempting to protect in the Skokie case wasn’t protected in Charlottesville. The marchers in Skokie didn’t promise to bring guns and armed militias to protect themselves.
as if it was a secret what the Nazis were all about in 1977, thirty-two years after the fall of the Third Reich.
Well, "most civil libertarians" weren't the targets of the Nazis, they weren't the ones who had the most to fear from them, neither were the members of state and federal Supreme Courts. I think the habit o of privilege that come with having judiciaries, the faculties of law schools, largely composed of affluent white people of the kind who have had the luxury of expecting that they are not going to be the ones attacked and killed by Nazis has produced a delusional view of the danger of things like this, one that is established by them in law and which did, in fact, produce the disaster that, not the lawyers, not the judges, but the police and the city and state authorities would have to deal with.
I have pointed out before that the Skokie case, allowing Nazis to terrorize a town where a large number of Holocaust survivors lived was the last straw that broke my support for the ACLU, the beginning of the end of my blindness to what that kind of legal pose really meant. It's way past time for that organization and the legal profession in general to be called on their part in enabling the Nazis, now that they are in the White House and marching on churches full of people with torches and generally terrorizing people.
No comments:
Post a Comment