Guest post: The breaking point for the ACLU

Originally a comment by Eava on Showing members how to gain children’s trust.

To play devil’s advocate, our laws about consent are legal fictions, not brain development. Legally minors can consent to sex in most states in the US. Depending on the ages of the minor and the adult, in some states a 14 year old can consent to sex with an 18 year old. In some states a minor can consent to vaginal intercourse, but not oral or anal sex, or the penalties are different, creating a disparity between gay and straight minors. There was a big blow up over a State Senator in California who put forth a law to equalize the penalties so a 21 year old who gets a blow job from a 16 year old boy faces the same penalties as a 21 year old who had vaginal intercourse with a 16 year old girl.

In the majority of US states a 16 year old can consent to sex with anyone regardless of how much older they are. I’d like to see a uniform age of consent in the US. It is wrong to me that someone can have legal sex in one state, but cross the state line and they’re now a criminal and their partner is now a victim. I don’t think there is anything illegal with advocating to change or even abolish age of consent laws.

But the height of irony is the organization that once fought to protect the right to spread unpopular beliefs about sex with minors has become the leading censor of spreading the idea that biological sex is real and we shouldn’t encourage children to think they can change their sex.

I think the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was the breaking point for the ACLU. They had advocated for the organizers to get the permits for the rally and the backlash, internal and external, for their role in the rally pushed the organization to try and find some line where it would not find itself complicit in white supremacist intimidation, violence, and murder. They lost a lot of donors, employees were quitting, and I think the leadership was unable to accept that the ACLU was on the side of the people marching with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil”, marching with semiautomatic rifles and assaulting non-violent clergy, driving a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters.

They adopted a policy where they would not advocate for any organization holding an event where participants were allowed to carry weapons, which seems like a practical line to draw because it crosses from pure speech to intimidation and threats of, if not actual, violence, which aren’t protected. Unfortunately it became a slippery slope for the organization, which turned it from an organization dedicated to protecting freedom of speech to an organization dedicated to protecting “marginalized” groups from the harm of hearing ideas they do not like.

5 Responses to “Guest post: The breaking point for the ACLU”