Standing up for law

It’s a back to the future moment for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The organization has a long and proud history of defending the First Amendment rights of some mighty unpopular groups. We’ve often taken issue with some of the causes they have aided and abetted, but never doubted the sincerity of their beliefs — or their courage.

Now in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, the ACLU is once again under fire. Its lawyers did indeed go before a judge in Virginia, defending the right of white nationalists to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee — at the site. City officials were prepared to allow a protest, but wanted a neutral site.

Now there is plenty of blame to go around for the poor planning that allowed one of the marchers to jump in a car and use it to kill Heather Heyer and injure more than a dozen other counter-demonstrators. The ACLU has conceded that from now on it will not defend groups seeking to march with weapons, which seems like an entirely sensible line in the sand for now.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe, perhaps a little too eager to point fingers, accused the ACLU of creating a “powder keg” in Charlottesville.

Boston’s handling of what turned out to be a tiny altright rally surrounded by a 40,000-strong counter-protest showed that such things can be managed without court action or mayhem. But we also know not every place is Boston.

The ACLU will weather this storm just as it did in 1978 when it defended the rights of neo-Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Ill., home to a large Jewish population and thousands of Holocaust survivors.

“We do not support Nazis,” the ACLU of Virginia said in a statement this week. “We support the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

Since the election of Donald Trump — and most importantly since the announcement of his travel ban — the ACLU has gone from 25,000 members to 1.6 million, raising $90 million in on-line contributions.

The ACLU has already done some soul-searching in the wake of Charlottesville. And surely the logistics of a protest and public safety need to be part of that equation.

But the organization has always operated on the principle that the answer to hate speech is more speech, not less. That is unlikely to change — nor should it.