Like so many others, I'm not sleeping well with the pandemic, the police-murders, the Trump-Barr fascist crackdown on demonstrated moral indignation, against those the police are murdering, the eager police participation in that fascist crackdown around the country - as I said, I've been afraid that the fascism obvious in so many American police departments would become far more dangerous since the 60s.
One of the results of those two of so hour of sleep nights is a decided decline in my editing and in my typing out passages from what I excerpt to comment on. I've fixed a few of those in yesterday's post, a couple were in this paragraph:
The non-establishment language, like the "free speech" demand is even in its strictest legal sense A REQUIREMENT ON THE GOVERNMENT, NOT THE PEOPLE. In the heady days of the new atheism of the 00s, yours was often the demand, that the religious, Christians easily 98 times out of a hundred, keep their religion to themselves and out of the public sphere. Such restriction was looked to by those wanting to obliterate religion as a means of getting rid of religion, I know that because so many of them expressed such a naive and childlike faith.
The objection to that is made that it is a violation of "The First Amendment" even as I noted that non-establishment of religion IS REQUIRED OF THE GOVERNMENT. THAT! is something I said not only in clear language but in all-caps. I don't know how much more explicitly I could have said it.
But, that is only the abstract principle, the abstract desire. Like it or not, many people don't agree with the that as an absolute ban on the government accommodating or even giving money to or sponsoring religious groups on all occasions or other such clear violations of that language. I don't happen to like that fact BUT IT IS A FACT. And it is a fact that a very large number of everything from mildly favoring such establishment of religion to being full supporters of religious involvement by government VOTE FOR THE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT, STATE GOVERNORS AND LEGISLATORS AND, IN SOME STATES SUPREME COURT "JUSTICES".
Such people, most of whom are hardly hard line theocrats have no problem with children singing Christmas songs in public schools, praying in public schools (one of the things I find most troubling, in fact is sectarian prayer as directed by teachers, administrators and coaches in schools) and just about totally innocuous maintenance of public monuments like that ugly war-memorial cross that was the focus of a predictably counter-productive case brought up to the present court which, as any idiot could predict, used it to EXTEND, NOT END the Rehnquist-Roberts courts permission to insert the government into religion.
My greatest objection to the ACLU, "Humanist" even some Jewish and other minority religion legal action which I may agree with in abstract principle is exactly that, IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE IT IS COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE IN THE REAL LIFE OF WHO GETS ELECTED AND WHO LOSES. It does not convert more people to the cause of non-establishment than it angers and that anger has a reaction which has the most disastrous of all results of such lawsuits ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE SUCCESSFUL of leading to Republican-fascists winning elections.
My biggest problem with the ACLU, other than their clear collusion with the media to permit them to lie with impunity, to lie to get Republican-fascists and their ilk into office is their idiotic insistence on bringing cases they have every reason to know are futile and which will have counter-productive results. I don't fucking care about the abstract "principle" I CARE ABOUT THE RESULTS IN REAL LIFE.
The ACLU has a financial interest in bringing such cases because they can get donations from the fans of such stupidity, many of them with the means to make those donations, probably people who are least impinged on by the failure of those predictably counter-productive lawsuits and the inevitable loss in the increasingly fascist Supreme Court.
They are one of the stupidest organization of smart people I can think of, they don't deserve the reputation they've got because they have such a knack for finding exactly the worst things to support, Nazis, white supremacists, giant media corporations, the porn industry, stupidest atheist stunts. The times they don't support the most counter-productive forces for egalitarian-democratic governments are are more than counter-balanced when the effect of their action has been to empower the worst and losing the case in the bargain.
I know for a fact that some state ACLUs won't take cases they think they won't win, they won't even take cases that they have a chance of winning if they don't think it will change the law - they don't have the resources to fight every case brought to them. So they don't choose to fight every case. They do so have a knack for finding cases they will lose as well as those in which winning will have terrible effects for the general cause of egalitarian democracy.
So, yeah, I do rather despise the ACLU and its phony, unreality based reputation and claim to fame. It is one of the greatest demonstrations of Benjamin Franklin's statement that a government of the wisest would be a very stupid thing because the wise are so apt to get all caught up in their imaginary ponderings while entirely unconcerned with the hardest of realities in real life. The ACLU isn't the only falsely denominated "leftist" group that does that but it has been one of the most damaging in real life.
The idea that each and every instance of that, from the maintenance of old largely ignored public monuments to having a coach inappropriately praying before a game (praying to win a sporting event, by the way, is a direct contradiction of The Golden Rule as taught by Jesus, which I will get to in tomorrow's posting) is always, in every case letting the camel get his nose under the tent is just stupid. Especially that's true when the court has a majority of Republican-fascists who have every intention of destroying equality and democracy, they are just giving them help, not fighting against it effectively.
The whole strategy of using the Supreme Court to further the cause was dicey as compared to winning elections and putting people in the Congress and the Executive. The Supreme Court is the least democratic branch, the one with the most appalling record, even worse than the presidency, on balance. Its famous good rulings are more than made up for by the bad ones. I think it's especially stupid to let lawyers whose lives are unconnected to the results of their cases to decide when it's counterproductive to bring a case. In a lot of those cases I think the lawyers cared most about their own publicity, not the actual results in real life for real people. We have been suckers for them. I stopped sending them money after they supported the Nazis First Amendment permission to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie. I stopped being a sucker for such principle.
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