Patrick Wilken wrote:
>
> >On 12/23/01 2:00 PM, "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey@datamann.com> wrote:
> >
> >> The ACLU IS a terrorist organization responsible for thousands of
> > > murders.
>
> Mike:
>
> This is a remarkable statement. Can you clarify? Are you implying
> that the ACLU has been effective in limiting certain liberties (gun
> ownership?) that would have directly lead to the saving of 1000s of
> lives? Or are you saying that as a consequence of supporting certain
> civil liberties 1000s of people have died (i.e., by supporting free
> speech on the internet bad people have been allowed to hurt good
> ones)? Did they dramatically increase the chances of the 9-11?? Can
> you detail in a paragraph the exact atrocities that this evil
> organization has perpetrated. What are the names of the dead?
When you are dealing with statistical probabilities, you can't name the
dead specifically, because some of them would have died anyways.
However, it is a proven fact that for every 1% increase in the law
abiding population carrying concealed weapons, violent crime rates drop
by 2%. It therefore follows that when the ACLU lobbies for gun control
laws which limit the ability of x% of law abiding citizens to carry
concealed weapons, they are helping to kill y% more people via violent
crime.
Additionally, since it is also a proven fact that 90% of crime is
committed by less than 2% of the population, that most crime is caused
by repeat offenders. When the ACLU helps to release a person who did, in
fact, commit a crime, due to some legalistic technicality, they are
directly responsible for the ability of that criminal to commit more
repeat offenses, and the ensuing generation of victims of those crimes.
Similarly, when the ACLU defends the rights of organizations dedicated
to stripping civil rights from members of some race, creed, gender, or
ethnic group, they assist in the continued viability of those
organizations, and also lend such groups a legitimacy with some members
of the population they would not have otherwise had.
This is all fact which cannot be disputed. What we as a free people need
to accept is that a) with freedom for all individuals, this places the
onus on the individual to choose to act in a trustworthy manner or not,
and b) we should not deny that having these freedoms does in fact create
a 'blind spot' that those who are untrustworthy can exploit to cause
harm and misery. The problem we as a society face, if we are insistent
on keeping our freedoms for all, is, if we do not want to remain at high
risk of criminal attack, to create some means of filtering out
individuals who are not trustworthy enough to participate in our open
society.
The standard of filtration which was adopted when the Constitution was
written was that 'all are innocent until proven guilty'. This has,
unfortunately, been eroded by the forces of moral and social relativity
over the past century or so, such that being proven guilty does not
necessarily make one so untrustworthy that they are unable to continue
to exploit our societal blind spots. While the principles of redemption
and rehabilitation do run through our society, they should not be
assumed as a default characteristic of all prisoners upon release from
prison. Prison does not rehabilitate, nor are all prisoners able or
willing to be rehabilitated.
Furthermore, the 'innocent until proven guilty' standard cannot apply to
individuals immigrating. Those wishing to travel to our open society
from societies with much lower standards of trust must be held up to a
higher standard of behavior, because, as we have seen, the worst such
societies do not generally cooperate with our immigration authorities in
determining who is trustworthy or not (especially in the case of
individuals who are members of state sponsored terrorist groups).
The facts are that the ACLU has worked for decades to tear down these
standards of filtration which our open society needs to maintain high
trust institutions and interrelations between individuals. They seek to
make us into a third world, low trust society of aristocrats and serfs,
where the most powerful aristocrats are the lawyers, who gain their
power from selling 'rights' to the highest bidder (be that an individual
bidder, or a special interest group).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:30 MDT