Happy Fourth Day of Christmas. Today’s gift goes to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The order of these posts is absolutely not intended to be meaningful, and certainly not to imply an ordering, but it did feel right to put the SPLC and ACLU next to each other. There’s a lot of overlap in their mission, defending the rights and liberties of all Americans. But while the SPLC focuses narrowly on a particular type of threat (hate groups and bias-related crime) and goes very deep on that, the ACLU has a much broader focus. They defend the Constitutional rights of every american, and are undoubtedly the strongest defenders of our 1st Amendment rights… including defending the rights of people who say some pretty abhorrent things. It’s easy to defend the rights of people you like, but the ACLU has defended the KKK and Rush Limbaugh. They were involved in the Scopes Monkey Trial and Roe v. Wade, and were perhaps the loudest organized voice fighting the concentration camps the U.S. set up for Japanese Americans during WWII. They continue to defend our rights daily, with a particular focus on our rights to free speech, privacy, reproductive freedom, and criminal justice reform.

The ACLU is coming up on 100 years of operation in 2020, and it’s increasingly looking like we’re going to need them more of the next four than any time in my lifetime. Consider joining the fight.