[WinteryDays]

Nope. I support them on this issue. This is not an issue about public free speech. They have a right to police their own organization and if they feel they are employing someone that is presenting a negative image they have a right to remove that person.

I agree with their right to do so 110%.

[dead]

Of course they have the right to do it, but their self-censorship creates a pretty bad PR problem for them.

It really enforces the image of the "defenders of free speech" as hypocritical and intolerant of speech outside their concept of what is acceptable.

But they have every right to parade their hypocrisy. It's a free country.

[BlueStateDepression]

OK, absent context you make a valid point. One that I agree with from the standpoint of a private sector tax paying business.

Now lets add the context of the ACLU being an entity that is at least in part funded by tax dollars gained from suing public infrastructure and collecting lawyers fees for doing so.

Lets add the context that the ACLU is supposedly doing much of this suing under the pretext of privay rights and the ability to speak your mind freely.

I ask you this, how does an entity in this context retain its credability (barf) on the issue of supporting free speech for all when they restrain their own people from excercising that very speech?

Do as I say not as I do? Sure looks that way to me!

[leilani]

I agree with their right to do so 110%.

Agreed. The problem is, this same organization does not agree with anybody else's right to do so. Their patently hypocritical position on free speech for their own members is representative of their compulsively craven hypocrisy on every other issue and only serves to undermine further the reputation of an organization which, truthfully, probably served a very noble purpose forty years ago.

That said, I think other people on this thread are off the mark on Nat Hentoff. He is probably the modern-day ACLU's most fervent critic, and it is likely he and a few of the other 'vintage' members, who regularly balk at the fascistic, bigoted organization the ACLU has transmogrified into in its current incarnation under current leadership, who are being targeted by this absurd directive.

[Leatherneck_MT]

What too many people tend to forget is.. even tho they may not support or agree with the ACLU, it is a private organization, not a government one.

As such they are free to be idiots and to insist that nobody in their organization publicly criticizes them from BEING idiots.

I support them on this as well, even tho I despise the ground they stand on.

[Winston Smith]

TROLL ^