Volokh on "ACLU Derangement Syndrome"

Eugene Volokh has an interesting, and quite accurate, post about what he calls "ACLU derangement syndrome". This notion follows on the heels of "Bush derangement syndrome", "Clinton derangement syndrome" and "NRA derangement syndrome. The idea is that some subjects prompt such anger in some people that they are incapable of thinking rationally about that subject. There are some who are so fanatically opposed to President Bush that they will accept any criticism of him no matter how nutty, and this was also true of many on the right regarding Bill Clinton - the very mention of their names sent some people into apoplectic fits and rendered them incapable of reasoned discourse on the subject. The same is certainly true, as Volokh points out, of many people with subjects like "sodomites" or "Jews".

Volokh's post was written in reply to a post by Clayton Cramer, and it is Cramer that Volokh says is suffering from ACLU derangement syndrome. In this post, Cramer pointed to a patently ridiculous trial going on in Italy where an atheist and a priest are suing one another over the question of the existence of Jesus and a judge has actually ordered the priest to prove in court that Jesus did in fact exist. Such a case would almost certainly be thrown out of court in the US. And Cramer then suggests that the ACLU was looking for a way to criminalize parents teaching their children about religion:

Now, I would like to think that the freedom of religion and freedom of the press provisions of the First Amendment would prevent such a suit from going forward in the U.S.--but you never know what cleverness the ACLU will pull out of its bag of magic tricks next.

In Britain, a prominent scientist is arguing that religion is a form of child abuse [quote omitted]...

Ah, that's it! The ACLU will argue that children have a right to not be mentally abused by exposure to religion. This was, after all, the policy of the Soviet Union, which prohibited teaching religion to those under 18, and the ACLU's founder was a defender of Soviet practices on civil liberties...

This is exactly the type of ridiculous and over-the-top rhetoric that I frequently blast here regarding the ACLU, and it's nice to see Prof. Volokh jump on it. He begins by noting that after the 1930s and the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Roger Baldwin (the founder of the ACLU) became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and of communism. He wrote a book called A New Slavery, referring specifically to forced labor under communist governments and purged the ACLU of all communists involved at the time, presiding over the organization's trial of communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn himself.

Volokh wrote to Cramer and asked him if he had any evidence that the ACLU would support any attempt to interfere with what a parent may teach their own child about religion. Naturally, he had none and was drawing absurd inferences from unrelated ACLU positions:

Its long history of opposing religious instruction in public schools, even when multiple beliefs were being taught, with the permission of the parents? I'm thinking of McCollum v. Board of Education (1948). I don't know if they participated in that suit or not, but I do know that they have participated in suits attempting to suppress far less substantial expressions of Christianity, such as the Los Angeles County seal idiocy.

Volokh correctly points out that these things have nothing to do with a parent's right to teach their own child about religion. The ACLU's suits deal almost exclusively with what a government agency may say about religion, not what a private organization or, far less, a parent can say about religion. They simply aren't the same thing, and any attempt to equate them is evidence that the person making the equation simply can't think rationally on this subject. Volokh concludes:

But, unfortunately, it seems to me that much criticism of the ACLU of the right reflects more by way of knee-jerk hostility than simply well-founded ideological disagreement. The four Derangement Syndromes I noted in the first paragraph (yes, the term is partly facetious; I don't think it's literal "derangement") have different moral qualities -- but what they share in common is a hostility that causes the speaker to miss contrary evidence, and to lose a sense of perspective.

Quite right. When you see halfwits like Gribbit declaring the ACLU the "biggest terrorist this nation has ever produced", you know you're dealing with someone who simply shuts off their brain when this issue comes up. There is no point in trying to reason them out of their position (and when I fisk them, I'm doing so for the benefit of others, not for them) because they weren't reasoned into that position in the first place.

Update: Cramer seems to have mastered the art of the irrelevant answer to legitimate criticism. At the bottom of his post he notes Prof. Volokh's criticism and purports to answer it:

Professor Volokh refers to this post as "ACLU Derangement Syndrome." But even a self-identified civil libertarian who describes himself as "am more likely to defend the ACLU then criticize it" argues in the comments over there that, "even I see that in a few instances ACLU takes its position to an extreme to threaten other freedoms."

Is he serious? Is that really the best argument he can come up with to defend his unjustified assertion and to answer Volokh's detailed and well-reasoned answer to that assertion, that an anonymous commenter on that blog agrees with him without giving any examples or evidence? That's an extremely weak argument from a guy who is obviously very bright and well educated.