The Alliance Defense Fund's (ADF) National Media Relations Manager, Greg Scott, provided to ProCon.org a document compiled by Craig Osten, ADF's Vice-President of Presidential Communications and Research, titled "The American Civil Liberties Union - The Number One Religious Censor in America Today," in an Aug. 8, 2006 email:
"The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the number one religious censor in America today. Despite their claim to be a great defender of religious freedom, they actively seek, through a continued war of fear, intimidation, and disinformation to bully public officials into suppressing any public expression of religious faith. In addition, they use legal and political means to force many Americans to violate their own core religious beliefs."
Michael Novak, Director at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in his July 12, 2002 column for the National Review Online, "The Atheist Civil-Liberty Union?":
"The
American Civil Liberties Union has a public agenda, and that agenda
appears to be this: to make the United States in all her public
manifestations reflect an atheist's view of the nation's Founding and
continuing existence.
[T]he ACLU's... calls for the
elimination of 'In God We Trust' from our coins... 'Under God" must
also be torn from the Pledge of Allegiance. The Commandments given
Moses must never appear as public symbols under government auspices."
Alan Sears, JD, President, CEO and General Counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, wrote in a Jan. 25, 2006 article titled "Court Nixes ACLU's Ten Commandments Tirade," published on Crosswalk.com:
"[T]he
ACLU, with its increasingly paranoid determination to eradicate every
trace of religion from America's history, culture, community, and
discourse, has become all but unhinged with furthering its agenda of
official atheism... For more than half a century, the ACLU has been so
adamant in their insistence on their interpretation of the 'wall of
separation between church and state' that all too many Americans
believe those very words are constitutional bedrock. They aren't....
To
their minds, religion (and especially the traditional Christian faith)
will always be something that contaminates American culture - corrupting
our laws, rather than undergirding and informing them. They will always
see God as a threat to human freedom, and those who believe in Him as a
danger to the ACLU's own thoroughly humanistic agenda."
Ken McElroy, columnist for the American Federalist Journal wrote in his Oct. 20, 2001 article published by the American Federalist Journal, titled "God Bless the ACLU":
"Organizations should be judged by their actions, not by their words. Often, high-minded rhetoric is cover for more nefarious goals. This needs to be remembered when organizations such as the ACLU tell us that they're protecting the Constitution, when in fact their real aim is to remove any vestige of America's religious traditions from our public life."
The American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Director of the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, Jeremy Gunn, PhD, on Feb. 21, 2006 emailed ProCon.org a document titled "The ACLU Defends Freedom of Religion" stating:
"The ACLU is fully engaged in defending a broad range of constitutional rights, including rights related to freedom of religion and belief. It is sometimes wrongly imagined that the ACLU does not vigorously protect rights of freedom of religion, particularly of Christians. The following recent cases illustrate just how wrong these misconceptions are."
The ACLU stated in its Summer 1999 Briefing Paper titled "Church and State":
"Our
nation's framers were determined to protect religion from government
interference because they understood the sanctity and importance of
individual faith and true religious freedom. Today, our national
commitment to the separation of church and state as the best way to
ensure religious liberty is more important than ever.
Commitment to the
separation of church and state is not an anti-religion stance. Indeed,
it is the best guarantee that each individual has the right to practice
his or her religion, without coercion, hostility or violence. Keeping
religion out of the hands of the government is our best guarantee for
continued religious freedom and religious harmony."
Raul Cano, Bowling Green University Alumnus, wrote in his Sep. 27, 2004 article for BGNews.com, titled "Establishment Clause Misread":
"For
one, the ACLU is not anti-religion, it just takes offense when the
coercive forces of the state are used to push religion on the people of
this country...
If the government was to ever try to get
the Catholic League, the Christian Coalition, or the ADL off the
internet, you can be sure that the ACLU would come to their aid."
Ed Brayton, freelance writer, stated in his Jan. 3, 2005 article for Dispatches From The Culture War, titled "ACLU Defending Religious Liberty":
"Contrary to the hysterically
overblown view so common on the religious right (a view intentionally
planted there by frauds and hucksters like Pat Robertson), the ACLU
regularly goes to court to defend Christian churches and organizations.
It should perhaps
also be noted that the ACLU was a staunch supporter, along with groups
like the Family Research Council and the Christian Legal Society, of
the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act that was
passed in 2000, as well as the Equal Access Act, which guarantees that
religious groups have the same access to public facilities that any
other community groups do. And of course there was the situation in
Massachusetts, where the ACLU defended the right of an elementary
school student who wanted to hand out candy canes to his classmates
with a card attached that had a Christian message on it. Are these the
actions of an organization that hates Christianity and wants to
forcibly remove it from our society, as so many folks on the religious
right claim?"
