Private Public Rights in the Men's Room

I Didn’t Know the ACLU Gets Government Funding!

I lead a sheltered life. Thus I had no idea thatgovernment pays our tax dollars to the ACLU. Somehow I thought it was funded by all those leftie civil rights enthusiasts…live and learn.

Here is that benevolent institutions latest enthusiasm:

The American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that men who have sex in public washrooms should be protected under court rulings guaranteeing privacy.

…the ACLU filed an amicus brief to the Minnesota 4th District Court citing a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms “have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The brief was filed in defence of Republican Senator Larry Craig who was arrested and charged with lewd conduct in June 2007.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, “The real motive behind secret sting operations like the one that resulted in Sen. Craig’s arrest is not to stop people from inappropriate activity. It is to make as many arrests as possible - arrests that sometimes unconstitutionally trap innocent people.” Solicitation for private sex is protected speech under the First Amendment, the ACLU argues.

Romero wrote, “If the police really want to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically. That works.”

Mr. Romero is absolutely right. Big signs in men’s bathrooms; that will do the trick, so to speak. Except what do you say to children who want to know what those signs mean? If we’re really going to be fair about it, why not separate bathrooms for the heterosexual and homosexual male members [sorry] of the public? Surely that would be cheaper than all this litigation.

On the other hand, it would probably mean having to downsize the ACLU. We wouldn’t need as many lawyers, would we?

From the same article:

In 2006, the American Legion, the largest veterans’ organization in the US, called on the government to stop funding the ACLU’s efforts to abolish traditional expressions of Christianity. District 21 Commander Rees Lloyd, on behalf of the Legion, testified to the Senate in support of a bill that would remove the power to award taxpayer-paid attorney fees to the ACLU.

“Benevolently intended fee provisions are being used as a bludgeon against public entities to surrender to ACLU’s demands, and being used to obtain profits in the millions.”

Our tax dollars go to the ACLU?? It still won't compute...
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Why don’t we just burn dollar bills to run electricity plants instead? Certainly it would make for less pollution than that which emanates from the nefarious activities of the ACLU.

In “A History of the American People,” Paul Johnson (a distant cousin of Charles, perhaps?) has a pertinent observation about the lawyer culture in the US:

[Their] subsequent growth in numbers and power in American, especially in the last quarter century, has been dramatic. Between 1900 and 1970, the numbers of lawyers as a percentage of the growing population was fairly constant, at about 1.3 per thousand. Doctors were 1.8 per thousand. After 1970, lawyers outstripped doctors, despite the increase in medical services, Medicare and Medicaid, and growing health-consciousness, because the demand for legal services rose still more sharply. By 1987 lawyers were 2.9 per thousand and by 1990 3.0 per thousand. In the quarter century 1960-1985, the population of the US grew by 30 percent and the number of lawyers by 130 per cent. Equally significant was the increase in the numbers of lawyers resident in Washington DC…from 1972-87, from 11,000 to 45,000.

Johnson attributes this extreme increase to several causes: an increase in our awareness of rights, the growth of the federal judiciary, and the ever-larger number of regulatory laws pumped out by Congress…

His most telling statement is about the effect of all these lawyers on our economy:

…despite the huge increase in those entering the legal profession, from 1,000 women and 15,000 men a year in 1970, to 14,000 women and 22,000 men in 1985, average annual legal earnings kept up very well. Inevitably, this increase in lawyers, litigation, and legal work was parasitical on the economy as a whole. One 1989 study indicated that the optimum number of lawyers needed was only 60 percent of he existing total and that each additional lawyer joining the profession above this total reduced America’s GDP by $2.5 millions.

[Quick: someone multiply 2.5 million by 40, just to see the big black lawyer hole to see how much money actually went down the tubes]

…the whole thing gives one a schadenfreude moment: what would happen to all that if Ron Paul took the oval office while the Dems and Pubs were arguing about hanging chads? Yeah, I know he’s unrealistic, but so is our lawyer-burdened society, and he’s a whole lot less smarmy.

The interesting times would proceed apace should the good doctor take the prize. If it’s any comfort at least the ACLU would be hit by the same missile that would get us.


Hat Tip: The Bear Diaries