Radley Balko on conservatives screaming, "Where's the ACLU?" on the rare occasion that they get angry about someone's civil liberties being violated. In this case, their very public opposition to the TSA's new security procedures:
As noted above, the ACLU has made records requests. Moreover, in the time between [William] Teach's initial post on November 16 and his follow-up on November 25, the ACLU also posted an online petition where users could send complaints to DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano, published a "Know Your Rights" guide for travelers, and sifted through the hundreds of complaints to publish a guide explaining what travelers can expect to encounter because of the new procedures.
I'd imagine they haven't yet filed suit because the new procedures are, well, new. Generally speaking, you need to find someone whose civil rights were violated before you can file a civil rights lawsuit. And this, as the ACLU notes, is one purpose of collecting the stories.
This quote from Rush Limbaugh that Balko highlights is a classic of the "where's the ACLU" genre:
Oh, yeah, and where's the ACLU on this? I mean unless there's a Muslim being patted down, they don't seem to care about the Fourth Amendment or anything else.
A couple of things -- one, this seems like a pretty textbook case of epistemic closure. Conservatives didn't know where the ACLU was on the TSA's new procedures because all of their sources of information were sitting around angrily asking, "Where's the ACLU?" without actually bothering to find out. Balko points out that the last time around, conservatives were angry about the ACLU not defending a couple of kids who were sent home for wearing American-flag shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote at the time, the ACLU did defend the kids in question. The incident was outrageous, but the only reason that case drew any conservative attention was because they saw the incident as an example of minorities oppressing whites.
Second, note Limbaugh's response -- it actually doesn't occur to him that part of how we got here was that he and his ideological cohorts were perfectly fine -- even enthusiastic -- about the government violating people's rights in the name of security as long as they happened to be Muslim. In Limbaughland, anytime the ACLU is intervening on behalf of an ethnic or religious minority, whites lose. That couldn't be further from the truth -- the way you make sure rights are inviolate is by making it so that frivolous reasons aren't justification to violate them.
