More than a few people online were taken aback when they saw the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) response to Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos‘ proposed Title IX guidelines on how to handle allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment on college campuses.
“We advocate for fair school disciplinary processes that uphold the rights of both parties in campus sexual assault and harassment cases. Today Secretary DeVos proposed a rule that would tip the scales against those who raise their voices. We strongly oppose it,” the ACLU said. “The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment, when there is already alarmingly high rates of campus sexual assaults and harassment that go unreported.”
Then came the third and fourth tweets:
“It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence,” the ACLU continued. “We will continue to support survivors.”
There already has been plenty of backlash at various publications in response to the DeVos proposal. At HuffPost: “Betsy DeVos’ New Title IX Guidelines Prioritize Schools Over Sexual Assault Survivors.” At Salon: “Betsy DeVos Moves to Demolish Title IX, Silence Sexual Abuse Victims.” At The Cut: “The Most Terrifying Parts of Betsy DeVos’s New Sexual-Assault Policy.” Here at Law&Crime, columnist Elura Nanos reacted this way: “Top Five Reasons to Loathe Betsy DeVos Today.”
National Review chimed in to say, on the other hand, “DeVos Strikes a Blow for the Constitution.”
In that article, senior writer David French went after the ACLU for silencing “generations of ACLU civil libertarians” with this embrace of “wokeness.”
“When I read those tweets, there was a disturbance in the legal Force, as if the voices of generations of ACLU civil libertarians cried out in anguish and were suddenly silenced by wokeness,” he wrote. “The old-school ACLU knew there was no contradiction between defending due process and ‘supporting survivors.’ Indeed, it was through healthy processes that we not only determined whether a person had been victimized, but also prevented the accused from becoming a ‘survivor’ of a profound injustice.”
Many others have concluded that the ACLU as they knew it is no more.
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1063492392739721216
https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/1063483767891943426
Others in the media, like Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, believe the ACLU is a casualty of the Donald Trump era and that people ought to support “an actual civil liberties group.”
[Image via Chris Kleponis-Pool and Getty Images]
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