Where's the ACLU to Defend the Duke Lacrosse Players?

by Rabbi Aryeh Spero
Posted Dec 21, 2006

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18531

If ever there was a case screaming for the assistance of the ACLU on behalf of defendants suffering denial of their civil rights and the need to go after a prosecutor abusing his power, the Duke lacrosse case is it. Yet the ACLU remains silent.

By now and for months, the prosecutor’s flouting of the most basic legal and civil rights procedures has become transparent and beyond question to all those following this case. The defendants have been accused by a plaintiff who misidentified them when given her chance during the police photo line-up. Worse, the DNA results of the semen taken from the accuser do not match those of the boys she is accusing of rape. There are contradictions in the timeline first provided by the plaintiff, and her partner at the scene presents a story at odds with what the accuser is positing. We now hear that the accuser has even gotten herself pregnant, somewhere else.

The ACLU is not moved. Instead, it is out there every day bringing lawsuits on behalf of known terrorists planning or already guilty of committing acts of terrorism against innocent U.S. civilians. Unlike the Duke case, where the deprivations to the boys involve civil rights matters firm and already settled in decades of case law, the claims by the ACLU on behalf of the jihadists are mostly spurious and flimsy.

While hardened terrorists who have announced their vile intentions against Americans, and boast of it, pull the heart strings of the ACLUniks, the ongoing plight of the accused American boys who deny guilt and are, in principle, against such crimes, does not stir the conscience of the ACLU. They don’t care that these boys are not getting a fair shake. Rules of procedure, duration, evidence, authority, and secretion apply only to non-U.S. Muslim terrorists, according to the ACLU, not white, Christian, mainstream, middle class Americans.

This case has been going on for months, with even more procedural and evidentiary aberrations and yet the “civil rights industry” remains silent as these young men are left hanging , with their reputations tarnished, their schooling interrupted and their families held in suspension while the Durham district attorney continues his crusade.

How well I remember the Central Park jogger rape and assault case here in New York City during the early 1990s when the civil rights industry and leftists, now silent, were demanding that the mob of black men accused of the vicious and cruel crime leading to a white girl being millimeters from death be spared anymore investigation so that “the boys could continue with their young lives and proceed on with their future.” This, despite the incontrovertible evidence of their guilt or accessory.

The Durham district attorney has consistently ignored the most basic procedural rules by hiding evidence from the lawyers of the defendants that would help the case of the young athletes. Not once, but twice. Be it by secreting the evidence of the private lab results or what happened the day of the photo lineup. There are other abuses of procedural conventions. Many believe this is a political case, with the Durham district attorney’s offering the scalps of some “privileged white kids” in return for the black vote so necessary if the D.A. is to be re-elected in this heavily black precinct.

And yet, while the ACLU is bringing a law suit against our President, authorized by the Constitution during time of war to spy on and investigate enemy combatants, as well as the U.S. attorney general, working in the executive branch on behalf of the President, they are taking no action against the Durham district attorney, who is clearly overriding the limited powers granted him and abusing and exploiting his government position at the expense of regular citizens, indeed it appears, harassing these young men and their families for his own personal reasons.

To be sure, for many liberals the boys are assumed guilty anyways since liberals believe—this is one of their mantras—that young, very white men do these things to poor black girls. They are presumed guilty until proven innocent, since even if they didn’t do it this time, they wanted to do it and would have done it if given the chance and if they wouldn’t get caught. We heard the same sentiment echoed by many liberals during the Tawana Brawley case, another fabricated case against white men involving a black girl. In other words, we need to show our outrage and teach a general lesson, though at the expense of a few innocent white individuals.

For decades already, most in the left/liberal community have viewed civil rights as an imperative for minorities only and not of import when involving mainstream America. Indeed, mainstream Americans are, in their view, not entitled to these basic rights when counter-facing minorities—witness affirmative action, bussing, and choosing Islamist sensitivities over our own safety.

On the other hand, Muslim terrorists are presumed innocent since, in the mind of many liberals, it is our white racism against Arabs and Moslems that impels us to deny them their civil rights. Of course, that is not true. The truth is that the terrorists are not citizens and thus un-entitled to constitutional rights and, furthermore, have announced their desire to kill us. In both situations, it is a prejudicial mindset by liberals against mainstream America that brings them to their warped conclusions and endeavors.

As to the ACLU specifically, it has long been obvious that they do not look at civil rights as an absolute and neutral edifice to be applied across-the-board but a selective tool to be used in behalf of their agenda to topple mainstream and historic America. The last people the ACLU wishes to defend are white, middle class, young Christian men from Garden City, N.Y., an enclave of mostly Catholic Republicans. That is the very American template they have sought over the last fifty years to destroy.

The ACLU takes up the cases of those viewed as anti-establishment, those who they see as part of the struggle to topple the WASP hegemony, Americana, and American traditions and values: namely, terrorists, abortionists, Islamic “multiculturalists,” atheists and secularists, minorities with grievances against “the system,” illegal aliens, and the anti-family provocateurs. Once in a while, they will represent a traditional American as a way to declare their “neutrality.”

Anybody can file a lawsuit. The ACLU is successful, however, because our courts are presided by judges who themselves believe in the de-construction of America and are already members of it or would be providing pro bono advocacy for ACLU clients if not busy meddling from the bench.

Most members of the ACLU despise serious and influential Christianity since, as non-Christians, they feel outside it and wish to destroy that which they can not control. Others are lapsed Christians, getting back. A preponderance of its acolytes can’t stomach our wholesome, traditional ways. They remain, however, immune from the effects of the sleazy gutterism their rulings create due to their ability to live in high-rise, door-manned luxury dwellings, or in lily white suburbs, or in privileged gated communities. This insulation provides them safety from the rulings they impose on others, the plebeians in fly-over-country.

Though wealthy, many are, at heart, command-and-control Communists who do not see their wealth as a consequence of the American capitalism they detest. They, self-righteously, view the legal profession as outside “crass capitalism”, indistinguishable from the universal professions like medicine, art, etc. They are not “business men.” In other words, their money is OK, and virtuous. Though raised to believe in economic equality, they, instead, now champion across-the-board cultural and sexual parity.

Mostly, the ACLUnik has been raised to believe that the greatest calling and mission is not patriotism, tradition, religion, reverence or love of country, rather “dissent.” Dissent shows you are doing something! You care! Dissent proves you are endowed with a greater social conscience, are better than others, yes, more enlightened.

But it must be a dissent against that which the ACLUnik was taught early on is the source of most of the world’s problems, specifically, the society of “privileged and racist” white, male, Christian, America. This privileged society is bad, they feel, and the root of all “minority” inequities. By trying to bring this society down, the ACLU’s own abundant money and access (its privilege) becomes sanitized, indeed something necessary to finance “the struggle.”

The ACLU is anti-American and hateful of what we cherish. The only thing American about it is that it operates in America and uses the American system to destroy historic America. The Islamists and their cohorts are doing the same thing. Birds of a feather.

Rabbi Spero is a radio talk show host, a pulpit rabbi, and president of Caucus for America. He can be reached at www.caucusforamerica.com.