Tuesday, 24 February 2004

...our lives, our $35, and our sacred honor. A year ago I paid my dues to defend the Bill of Rights: I joined the American Civil Liberties Union (First Amendment), the National Riflemen's Association (Second Amendment), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Fourth Amendment). (My Third Amendment rights appear to be safe for the moment, and I'm still shopping around for a fierce Sixth Amendment defender: I should probably just pay the ACLU twice, or else start paying more attention to this court case.) Now that a year has passed, it's time to ask the question: Which of these memberships should I renew?

On the surface, the NRA is the slickest outfit of the three: They sent me a real plastic membership card with an American flag and eagle motif, which can be presented at Ramada Inns nationwide for up to a 30% discount. (No joke. Membership also includes a discount drug plan, plus bargains on all sorts of NRA apparel and merchandise.) The NRA was also the most active of the three organizations at bombarding me with e-mail, requesting that I fax my legislators and urge them to confirm Bill Pryor's nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals; they also appear to have shared e-mailing lists with Reverend Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, a tinfoil hat group on the far right that's now sending me an apocalyptic e-mail of doom once weekly. (At least, I can't fathom any other way I would have gotten onto the AFA mailing list, unless Rev. Wildmon is indiscriminately spamming.)

I have to say that, while I believe that legal, responsible gun ownership is a right that should be protected, I don't approve of treating the judiciary as a second-chance legislature: Judges should be referees and not players. So, I won't be sending any more membership dues in the NRA's direction — but if there's some other organization that defends the Second Amendment without showing a broad, sweeping contempt for the rule of law in the process, I'm all ears.

The ACLU was more of a shoe-string outfit, providing a tear-away paper membership card with a Statue of Liberty theme. (I was disappointed. How am I supposed to show off that I'm a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" with a card that looks like I tore it from a magazine?) There aren't any benefits associated with ACLU membership, aside from the inner glow that comes from supporting a good cause: No discounts, no health plan, no package deals on megaphones or newsprint that I can see. The ACLU sent me occasional e-mails (at least once a month) of the "newsletter" variety, or inviting me to join an online chat with someone (usually a lawyer) about the ongoing threat to civil liberties.

Meanwhile, the ACLU used my membership dues to defend— Rush Limbaugh's right to privacy. Somewhere in a higher dimension Voltaire is laughing with delight: I may think Rush is a big fat liar, but I'll still pay to defend his rights. The ACLU is also fighting the idea that John Ashcroft can violate the plain words of the Sixth Amendment at will, if the defendant is accused of (ahem) weapons of mass destruction program related activities. I'm all for getting terrorists off the streets, but not by enabling future tyrants in the Justice Department. Keep up the good work, ACLU — here's another $35, and it's money well spent.

The EFF surprised me by being the least well-equipped of the three organizations to accept my membership dues via their web site: You would have thought the opposite, but I guess the other two get more donations. (Although, looking at their site today, it looks like they've improved; maybe they used my $25 to upgrade their servers.) To the best of my knowledge I didn't receive any e-mails from the EFF, except for one from the webmaster acknowledging the difficulty I'd had sending them a donation. It's possible that I slipped through the cracks here, and the EFF accepted my money without actually adding me to their membership roster; or, maybe, I just absent-mindedly unchecked all the boxes that allowed the EFF to contact me, since they're very good about asking permission to e-mail.

On the other hand, the EFF goes to bat for issues that will be on the ACLU's plate in another ten years — censorship through the deliberate abuse of copyright law, "digital rights management" that restricts fair use of the material, standards bodies and industry groups that behave as de facto cartels, using the legal system as a weapon to bankrupt individuals, and so on. They're up against a gallery of 21st-century robber barons, most of whom (unlike their 19th century counterparts) don't even offer up the fig leaf that their grasping greed makes our economy more efficient. Here again I think I'm getting off cheap by spending only $25 to defend these rights, when my forefathers risked their entire fortunes and more to establish them.

So, two out of three organizations get their renewal checks… and I'm in the market for a Second Amendment defender that isn't explicitly trying to rig the judiciary in their favor. Any takers?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:25 am. comments.