So I’m not the biggest fan of the ACLU, but there are things they get right.

One famous case was from 1977, when a group of neo-Nazis decided to hold a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois. Half the residents of the village were Jewish, with hundreds being Holocaust survivors.

Obviously abhorrent and disgusting. Officials tried to block them from doing so.

The Nazi leader, Frank Collin, reached out to the ACLU for recourse. He spoke with the legal director David Goldberger, a jew.

He decided to take the case, and they litigated the case past an injunction, appealing to SCOTUS. Despite the high court coming down on the side of the First Amendment, Goldberger and the ACLU faced immense backlash.

“One night during the case, I received a call at home in which the caller said I would be punished for representing the Nazis. Late one afternoon, members of the Jewish Defense League appeared at the Illinois ACLU office reception area swinging baseball bats while a staff member hurriedly closed the door to my office so I would not be seen. At my parents’ synagogue, a rabbi gave a sermon excoriating me for defending the free speech rights of Nazis. Fortunately, my parents were not present at the time,” Goldberger wrote.

In a sharp U-turn, the Nazis eventually agreed to change the location to downtown Chicago, with conditions.

This all came at enormous cost to both Goldberger and the ACLU. But their stand for principle above pressure is admirable and stands as an enduring testament to the value of free speech, including and especially for speech we find highly offensive, which of course includes “hate speech.”

I believe censoring abhorrent ideas is far worse than the risk of letting them propagate freely.

Just like in an individual’s psyche, if our society represses ideas, no matter how terrible they are, they will inevitably project outward in some contorted way. When we repress something, we give it power over us.

Reference: aclu.org/issues/free-speech/skokie-case…