Has anyone seen an ACLU card?

I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU. Okay, that's not technically true. I have no card (are there really cards?) but I remember some Republican politician (the first George Bush?) treating the phrase as if it were a high insult and I remember having no idea why. I actually still don't get it. Who thinks defending civil liberties is a bad thing?

You might ask what the ACLU of Michigan has been doing lately. While you can go to their website and read up on them yourself, I wanted to share two things. First: the ACLU represented a Michigan minister whose probation was revoked based on the judge deciding that an article he wrote for a small Chicago newspaper was “defamatory and demeaning” and such communications
violated the conditions of his probation. The Michigan Court of Appeals found that the terms of the probation were unconstitutional as they impinged on the first amendment rights of the man.

Second: they released a report on the school-to-prison pipeline in the state and the disproportionate disciplinary actions taken against Black students:

“In school district after school district, from one end of the state to another, we found that black kids are consistently suspended in numbers that are considerably disproportionate to their representation in the various student populations,” said Mark P. Fancher, ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Project staff attorney and principal author of the report. “More alarming still are studies we examined that show that the behavior of black kids and white kids is essentially the same, and black kids are still kicked out of school proportionately more often. This is true regardless of socio-economic factors and geography.”

Previous studies have shown that students who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school. 68% of incarcerated Michigan residents are identified as high school drop outs. More information on the report can be found in the linked press release and the report is “Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids: Students Trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline." Well worth reading.