American Craig Loving Union

The American Civil Liberties Union is trumpeting its moderate-ness for defending Larry Craig, the conservative who plead guilty to soliciting sex in an airport men's room, and was formerly accused of sexual advances on teenage pages. This is unimpressive for a few reasons:

First, standard legal advocacy suggests bringing cases that are sympathetic to groups that don't normally affiliate with your group. This helps you appear to be a moderate while still promoting radical ideas. The extra sympathy lets you set precedents that will help you when you defend the interests you are really hunting. (As an example, nearly every Supreme Court sex discrimination suit in the last 60 years have been brought by men who felt discriminated against by women. They seem to be more sympathetic.) In this case the ACLU hopes to gain ground with conservatives who are hesitant to condemn one of their own. Once the precedent is set, you can bet that it will be used to defend every other type of deviant.

Next, the ACLU isn't really helping a true conservative. Craig's actions show he doesn't really believe in the conservative values he claimed. So the ACLU is not reaching across the aisle in a spirit of bi-partisanship, they are defending the same type of client they normally defend. The fact that this deviant claims not to be conservative does not make it so. But since he has labeled himself conservative this will help ACLU's dues-paying members to feel that they are tolerant.

Finally, if the ACLU really wanted to defend civil liberties (and I mean the only civil liberties the ACLU recognizes: the right to have sex with anything, anywhere; and the right to stop others from practicing their religion), they would have defended Jack McClellan, the now famous, always infamous pedophile who has been restrained from being near children anywhere in California. Even though his case is a stricter violation of our civil liberties they pass it up because it would confirm the public's opinion about them.