Published on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 by Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah)
ACLU Says Membership Has Doubled — Thanks To Bush Presidency
by Matthew D. LaPlante
By many measures, the Bush administration has been bad for civil liberties.
Yet the past seven years have been particularly good for the American Civil Liberties Union. National membership in the organization, which fights for freedom of speech and religion, equal protection, due process and privacy, has doubled since Bush took office in 2001 - an extraordinary spurt of growth for the 88-year-old institution.
“I think it’s very much a reflection of the fact that there was a very aggressive assault on civil liberties,” said ACLU national deputy executive director Dorothy Ehrlich. “Over the past seven years, many Americans felt their own cherished values were under attack, and they didn’t want to sit by.”
The ACLU counted about 250,000 members in the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Today, the organization has about 500,000 card-carriers, 2,500 of them in Utah.
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