ACLU Attack Off-base

(In response to Catherine Smith’s Nov. 4 article “ACLU: Liberties or license?”)

Catherine Smith expresses a concern for the well-being of children, a concern I share. But her attack on the American Civil Liberties Union is completely off base. If not for the ACLU, the rights of two 13-year-old girls — myself and Savana Redding — would have been violated children in the public schools could be strip-searched, and neither teachers nor students in public schools would have First Amendment rights.

Growing up in Iowa in the 1960s, my life centered around the Methodist church where my father preached. During the week, we practiced our values but that didn’t always make us popular. When we spoke up and against segregation, the kids across the street yelled, “Hey, [N-word] lovers!”

In 1965, when I was 13 and some of us kids wore black armbands to school to mourn the Vietnam War dead and to support a Christmas truce, the Minutemen sent us a postcard, threatening we would be their next target.

Others called us Communists, threw red paint at our house and threatened to bomb our house on Christmas Eve. These were the real-world consequences of exercising your free speech rights.

Thankfully, the ACLU offered to help. They took our case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1969 that neither teachers nor students give up their rights at the schoolhouse gate.

On Nov. 7 I was in Phoenix with Savana Redding, who was strip-searched in 2003 at Safford Middle School when she was 13. Like me, the ACLU helped her. This past summer, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it is wrong to strip-search students in public schools.

We are lucky to have the ACLU to defend the rights of the young and old. But doing so does not always make them popular. Still, like my Methodist parents, they know there are more important things than popularity: democracy, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Mary Beth Tinker
Reader