Paul Kengor has a very good piece on the American Civil Liberties Union and its communist/atheist roots. No wonder they are in perpetual war against Christmas. Kengor on ALCU founder Roger Baldwin:
Baldwin was an atheist. He was also a onetime communist, who, among other ignoble gestures, wrote a horrible 1928 book called Liberty Under the Soviets. Notably, he was smart enough not to join Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Other early officials of the ACLU, which was founded almost exactly the same time as the American Communist Party, included major party members like William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Louis Budenz (who later broke with the party). Communists used the ACLU to deflect questions from the U.S. government over whether they were loyal to the USSR, were serving Joe Stalin in some capacity, and were committed to the overthrow of the American system.
That whole “overthrow-the-government” thing is something our universities tell us is baloney, a bunch of anti-communist, McCarthyite tripe. In fact, it took me mere minutes of digging into the Comintern Archives on CPUSA to find actual fliers and formal proclamations from the American Communist Party publicly advocating precisely that objective. (Click here to view some of the documents.) I also found the ACLU rife throughout those archives…
Defending communists secretly committed to Stalin’s Russia had been a central component of the ACLU’s work since its inception.
It need hardly be said that Soviet communism — whether in power in Moscow or advocated abroad — is hostile to Christianity. What few Americans understand is how influential that ideology was on an American institution (the ACLU) that continues to exert influence today.
