mustangsally78:jumpingjacktrash:williamsockner:penguinfaery:prayforoptimists:craftbeerhallputsch:kro
mustangsally78:jumpingjacktrash:williamsockner:penguinfaery:prayforoptimists:craftbeerhallputsch:kropotkitten:factoryshowroom:good job giving them all that money suckers. its almost like this could have be forseen by looking at how the ACLU has approached nazism and white supremacy for the entire history of the organization but that might involve a single critical thoughtthey also protect rapists. My city was/is threatened with a lawsuit from them cause the city has stricter rules about where rapists/sex offenders can live than the norm and apparently ACLU considers it a violation of the rapists’ rights since effectively they can’t live in the city cause there are so many schools and the school zones overlap. The funny thing about constitutional rights is that they still apply to terrible people. Believe me, when constitutional rights are not protected, nazis and rapists are not the ones that suffer the most, its religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people and left wing activists.But hey, rally against your own rights to punish rapists and nazis, and watch how quickly they’re forgiven and we’re the ones pursued. Happens every single time.The ACLU isn’t perfect but they’re vital to the US and that this can’t be understood means they either don’t get law or don’t get how law interacts with society.Legally we need ALL speech free, on a governmental level. Sorry. It would probably delight Milo Yappyweinerdog to NO end to get some kinda ruling against free speech so the people he is playing troll for could immediate turn around and use it against those they hated. You know…us? At what point do you think “The Government had the right to control what a person can talk about.” is going to work out in the favor of minorities? You know, the Government currently run by Trump? You wanna give him that power so you don’t have to deal with Milo Yappyweinerdog showing up on your facebook feed?It’s not like that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t tell him where to shove it.Re: the ACLU and the rapists, I’m assuming you live in San Diego and you’re talking about the In Re Taylor case.Here’s the thing: under Megan’s Law, registrants on the 290 registry (”sex offenders”) were barred from 97% of available housing, and the remaining 3% was often not available to them because, understandably, not many private landlords want to rent to people with sex offenses. What that effectively meant is that registrants, including people who were registered for sex work, public indecency or Romeo-and-Juliet violations, were being forced into homelessness by the government. Because if you are on parole and on the registry, you can’t just decide not to live in San Diego. You’re ordered, by the government, to live in the county you’re assigned to until you’re transferred or off parole. If not, you go back to prison.So what this meant is that San Diego had a huge homeless population of people with sex offense convictions. People who were living on boats - not yachts, but literal canoes - tied to random docks because it was the only place they could live without being thrown back in prison. And you know who suffers from this? Not just the registrants, but the public. Public safety is not enhanced by making people homeless.People who cannot live anywhere legally will drop off the grid and dodge their supervision. They won’t check in with their parole officers. They won’t bother to follow the law. They’ll commit more crime just to go back to jail so they have a roof over their head and shitty bare-bones medical care. They’ll steal and lie and beg so they can get enough food to fill their stomachs and they’ll get involved in trafficking and drug-dealing and worse just so they’ll be able to rest their head at night.What the court found in In Re Taylor, which decided the California registration requirements were unconstitutional, was that those registration were putting more people at risk. It put registrants at risk of homelessness and it put the public at risk of registrants breaking supervision and committing survival crime. The ACLU understood that treating everyone with human dignity and freeing people from oppressive government action - even convicted rapists - was in the internet of public safety. Human rights apply to everyone, even nazis and people convicted of sex offenses. The question should never be “does this person deserve to have their rights taken away?”. The question should be “do we trust the government to take those rights?”. A government with a history of racism, classism and transphobia, with documented history of suppressing leftist voices?Right now I don’t trust the government with a plastic fork, and neither does the ACLU.i am sitting here thinking about how “former sex workers should be allowed to live indoors” got turned into “the ACLU loves rapists and thinks they’re great” and i suspect some right-wing spin control happened in the middle of that processwhen the people trying hardest to protect your rights somehow turn out to be Ultra Super Problematic and you’re being encouraged to throw them under the bus, you need to stop and think real hard about why that’s happening and who’s trying to make it happenthe Angry Young Activist tendency to demonize anything that isn’t a perfect snowy shrine of absolute purity ultimately works in favor of the bad guys, because absolutely no one who does real work out in the world is completely unproblematic – LIFE is not unproblematic – so they get you to reject everything genuine and embrace useless symbols, or just get disillusioned and give upyou need to be able to see the value in things like “protecting the constitutional rights of everyone, even assholes” and “supporting candidates who, while not perfect, are better than their opponents” because boy howdy did rejecting clinton because she wasn’t flawless not work out for usFree speech means even ugly free speech. -- source link