Nat Hentoff has an interesting column in USA Today about a big fight going on within the ACLU over whether to allow members of the board of directors who disagree with a board decision to publicly dissent from those positions. At issue is this policy:
"Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement. ... There is always a material prospect that public airing of the disagreement will affect the ACLU adversely in terms of public support and fundraising."
This is a very, very bad idea. The ACLU's public support is more likely to be negatively effected by policies like this and they should know that. Hentoff is a former ACLU board member and he is rightly upset by it. So is present board member Wendy Kaminer. As a private organization, they have the legal right to pass such rules for their own board if they choose, but the policy is clearly in conflict with their mission and should be scrapped immediately. This is one instance where I will join with the STACLU crowd and criticize the ACLU for their hypocrisy (as I also have when they've chosen group rights over individual rights in the past).
What's the objection here?
How is allowing board members to publicly dissent from the ACLU's position "hypocrisy"?
Sorry, I just don't understand your point here.
Dave, I think you have it bass-ackwards here. The criticism is over a policy which stifles such dissent.
This policy is in opposition to the publically stated mission of the ACLU, to defend the freedom of speech (among others).
If the ACLU does change the policy, they will really have to encourage dissenters who publicly air their dissent to emphasize that they are speaking for themselves and not for the organization (the ACLU). The last quoted sentence of the policy is rather dubious, but when a member of an organization's board of directors, who is known to be a director, speaks out on a matter of interest to the organization, there is the likelihood of confusion that he/she is speaking on behalf of the organization.
Dave S.: I think you're right.
I mis-read the post.
Apologies.
The ACLU must recognize that there are disagreements not only among their board members but among the chapters as well. There have actually been cases where one ACLU chapter filed a brief on one side in a case, while another chapter filed a brief on the other side. This is particularly true when it comes to cases of group rights (which I maintain are entirely non-existent) and individual rights. There's a split over hate speech codes and the like. To censor those disagreements is to make a big mistake, in my view.