Separation of ACLU and State

By Monty Rainey
February 2, 2005

For over 150 years after the drafting of the First Amendment, only a select hand full of cases found their way before the Supreme Court.  That all changed radically in 1947 with the the now infamous Everson v. Board of Education case in which Justice Hugo Black et. al. wrongly construed Thomas Jefferson's "Wall of Separation" metaphor and the Court offered its first ever comprehensive interpretation of the constitutional pronouncement on church-state relations. In Black's opinion, all of the privileges and immunities of citizens recognized in the Bill of Rights became applicable to the states by dint of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Justice Black and the Court had no problem overlooking the Blaine Amendment of 1875 in which Representative James Blaine of Maine, at the behest of President Grant, submitted a resolution which would have made the First Amendment applicable to the states.  Blaine's resolution was rejected by a Congress which included twenty-three members of the Thirty-ninth Congress who had adopted the Fourteenth Amendment only seven years earlier. 

Nonetheless, by means of invoking judicial tyranny, the Court set in motion a chain of events which has spiraled into a quagmire of judicial usurpation, erosion of states rights, the de-Christianization of our society and a plethora of other ills which our Founder's certainly never envisioned nor intended.  As this tyrannical snowball continued on its path, it picked up steam in many venues, including many unintended.  For example, in 1976, a federal law was passed called the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act. The intention of this Act was to insure the poor would always have access to legal representation in civil rights cases.  In its deliberations, the Senate record shows, "in many cases arising under our civil rights laws, the citizen who must sue to enforce the law has little or no money with which to hire a lawyer".  But, as all good attorney's do, the ACLU found a loophole; a way to abuse the law in 42 United States Code Section 1988 in which the law has for many years now, been used to secure fees in esoteric battles over the meaning of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The statute gives a court, at its discretion, the ability to award attorneys' fees to the prevailing party in civil rights cases. What this all amounts to is, you, the taxpayer, are footing the bill for the ACLU to travel the country in search of ridiculous lawsuits which are counter to the principles on which our nation was founded. 

We all remember the 2003 removal of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore for his refusal to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Court House grounds. What we don't remember, or never knew, is that on April 14, 2004, Judge Myron Thompson awarded the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center and Americans United for Separation of Church and State $549,430.53 in legal fee reimbursements, all at the taxpayers expense. 

There are thousands of Ten Commandments plaques and monuments throughout the country and lawsuits to remove them have already popped up in over a dozen states and we, the taxpayers will pay for those lawsuits! But sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Kentucky taxpayers spent $121,500 to pay the ACLU for its legal action against a Ten Commandments monuments outside the Kentucky capital.  Taxpayers in a Tennessee county paid the ACLU $50,000 for the same "offense".  In Cincinnati, Ohio, taxpayers paid out over $46,000 to the ACLU in their lawsuit against a city ordinance. In their lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America, the ACLU collected over $790,000 of taxpayer money. Taxpayers dolled out another $106,000 to the ACLU in the Loudoun Virginia Library Case.  The list of cases is endless and the future looks only to get worse.

This abomination of the legal system and misuse of tax dollars must stop! Surprisingly, there are currently efforts in both the U.S. House and Senate to correct this abuse of the ACLU and other so-called civil rights protectors. Contact your Representatives now and tell them you want them to support legislation to amend 42 U.S.C. Section 1988 and take this loophole away from the ACLU. 

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