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Joining the ACLU?
X86Daddy writes "I'm currently a member of the EFF. I agree with everything they do. I'd like to further help protect liberty and freedom, and the ACLU advertises that they exist for that purpose. The ACLU is an organization well known for controversy. I've heard many opinions for and against it, and even a few citations of evidence. I've read their positions on their website, and although I strongly disagree with some of what they believe, I support the majority of their positions. I've also read some of their court filings, in search of more evidence of what they really do. I'm still undecided. I've even sent them an unanswered e-mail about the percentages of money spent on their main positions. So, I ask the Slashdot audience, what information do you have about the ACLU? I'm interested in facts about how they spend their efforts with regards to all of their efforts, electronic-related or not."
The ACLU believes that the first amendment protects the rights of child pornographers but that the second amendment has nothing to do with the right to bear arms.
Amen. I was going to post a tin-foil hat post about "THE ACLU IS IN CONTACT WITH THE ALIENS!!! I HOPE THIS ANONYMOUS THING WORKS!!!", but since there's no benefit from +1, Funny (really +0, funny) I just posted this.
Ron Paul 2012
OK, keep in mind while reading the following that I'm a member of the ACLU. I'm going to touch on some of their less popular positions, though.
The ACLU tends to be fanatical on matters of speech, even when most people would not necessarily be on their side. The case that Bill O'Reiley likes to rail against is where they have helped defend the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)... they really do believe that everybody has the right to say anything, no matter what it is and what might be done with that information.
They have also been famous in defending (and winning) the right of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and fascist Nazi-praising groups to march. Again, for them it's a bright line: no matter how vile the speech, the speaker has the right to say it.
They have also been very active in challenging the Bush Administration's position that they are able to keep suspected terrorists incommunicado for as long as they like.
I wouldn't necessarily want to live in a world where the ACLU positions always ended up prevailaing. I do, however, believe that they are a very necessary counterbalance to those interests that would drag us back to the bad old days of McCarthyism (I would ask Ann Coulter, "Have you no shame, Madame?") and other reactionary movements.
On September 11th, I sent money to two groups: the Red Cross and the ACLU.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Natural Rights/Human Rights- Rights granted by virtue of existence
Civil Rights- Rights granted by virtue of citizenship
Civil Liberties- Rights granted by virtue of legislative fiat
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I think the logic behind their NAMBLA argument isn't that pedophiles are okay... it's that writing about a crime is separate from actually comitting the crime. Like, they're getting legal shit beacuse they're writing HOWTOs on how to nail young boys.
Is it illegal to write HOWTOs on how to rob a bank, or crack DeCSS? No. But actually doing the deed is. The only thing that makes NAMBLA different is that they're pedophiles.
I mean, everyone hates pedophiles... but they haven't actually done anything besides write stuff.
no thanks
The ACLU says that the second amendment does not apply to individuals, but to state militia.
You could read it before you infer that it says something it does not say.
They're really an admirable organization in being dedicated to principles of civil liberties.
This often takes them into positions that are strictly correct in terms of principle, but extremely unpopular in terms of practice.
They will defend the rights of Nazis and pornographers to free speech, for example.
And they will sue to exclude any possible mention of God, Ten Commandments in official government documents.
And the right to refrain from saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
All of this makes great fodder on talk shows, where people can emotionally vent about how ridiculous this is.
Some people like that emotional venting more than they like the fundamental principles of liberty. That's fine for them.
Personally, I take those liberties very seriously. They are special conditions of being an American that make our country unlike most others.
As soon as you concede that any of those rights can be abridged for any reason under any circumstance, then you open up a potential Pandora's box.
If someone can decide Nazis and pornographers belong to a special class of people for whom civil liberties do not apply, then you have to admit that someone will have the power to put you into a similar classification some day and to silence your opinion. Your opinion could be "hate-speak" or "obscene" by John Ashcroft and you could be jailed.
If you say that mixing religion with government is OK, then you admit that it would be just fine if ever a hypothetical Muslim majority in the United States should decree that the Koran and sharia law would be posted in all schools and to which everyone must memorize and adhere, rigth after one of the 5 prayer sessions during the day.
[One very good reason our founding fathers tried to separate church and state was based on centuries of bloody evidence in Europe. Recall that Catholics and Protestants killed each other viciously for a long time. Many nations today Muslim fundamentalist are going down the same road today with wars between Shia, Sunni, Muslim and Hindu or Christian. How many centuries it will take for those conflicts to prove the point our foudning fathers recognized in the late 18th century I don't know.]
It's not popular or always expedient to be principled, but it's more enduring.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Some examples of my problems with them...
On the First Amendment, they will argue the "separation" part of freedom of religion till they are blue in the face, but completely ignore the "free exercise" part. I think the framers of the Constitution did a brilliant job of balancing these two concepts and to wildly expand on one by gutting the other detracts from what makes this amendment so great.
For a so-called civil liberties organization to actively pursue the anti-civil liberties side of the debate over the Second Amendment seriously undermines their credibility.
In too many stories I read in the news, they just seem to "get it wrong". For instance in the current debate over the California Recall, the ACLU wants a postponement until electronic voting machines are ready in all districts. Given that electronic voting really doesn't enhance the democratic process or voting security, this strikes me as an overly partisan move to buy embattled Mr. Davis more time. I would prefer an organization that raises issues for their own merit, not as some sort of political tactic.
In short, I would much rather there be a non-tech counterpart to the EFF... someone who doesn't just champion liberal civil liberties causes, or conservative civil liberties causes, or what have you, but consistently argues for freedom and liberty itself. While individual members no doublt have partisan leanings, keeping a pure message of "we support civil liberties, period" would better serve an organization than confounding the message with unrelated or contradictory positions for political sake.
They support the right to say anything, not bully people who disagree with them in front of private businesses.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
As long as we're dropping napalm:
I've been a member of the Sierra Club for about 10 years, one of their few but not negligible Republican members. My membership is running out soon and I'm unlikely to renew.
As soon as George Bush was elected they started a relentless, hysterical campaign against him. (Or, realistically, to raise money by tossing around his name.) In fact, there are plenty of his environmental policies with which I disagree (ANWR drilling, for example) but the Sierra Club gleefully tossed around nonsense like the "Bush wants to add arsenic to drinking water!" story and has ignored or denigrated all the positive things he's done.
The same thing happenend with Newt Gingrich. He was an environmentalist, and a Sierra Club winner. But working with him was less lucrative than scaring the NPR crowd with his name.
The global warming stuff also is starting to grate on me. All the environmental groups have embraced the notion that any deviation from the party line must be denounced and ignored. I'm getting increasingly suspicious about the religious nature of their claims, which generate suspicion about the nature of all the rest of their scientific claims (e.g. how best to deal with forest fires).
The last straw for me was their opposing the war in Iraq. I give them money to reduce fuel consumption and to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I do not give them money to promote a doctrinaire leftist national security policy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The government frequently passes laws to stop the bad guys from doing things, but these laws frequently can be used against regular joes as well. So when the ACLU sees a prosecution that's been done in a way that would work on a regular joe as well as a bad guy, it often goes to bat for the bad guy. The point isn't to defend what the bad guy is doing. It's to make the government use a method of stopping the bad guy that is discrimatory - that only works on bad guys, and not on regular joes.
:'} Point is, they're good folks. Their methods are a bit difficult to fathom if all you read about them is what CNN says, but there's truly a method to their madness, and they do good work.
Consider RICO. Its intent was to stop organized crime. Apparently it works pretty well at that. Unfortunately, it also works for corrupt police departments who just want to acquire stuff or fluff their budget. They go after someone who has something that they want, and looks dirty, but that they don't really know is dirty. They use a court order to confiscate things under the RICO statute. The person whose stuff has been confiscated has to sue to get it back, has to prove that they are not guilty. The cops don't have to prove anything.
Consider the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act. CDA sounds like a great idea - protect kids from online porn. Unfortunately, it doesn't work - there's plenty of online porn that kids can access. Worse, it actually protects kids from information that they might need - if you're 15, and wondering if having sex with your boyfriend can get you pregnant the first time, now you can't get information about it. If you want to know what the risks are from AIDS and how to fight them, that information is not available to you. COPA has actually succeeded in bowdlerizing the internet as seen from public libraries (google "Thomas Bowdler" to find out where that word came from). Although this was supposedly intended to protect children, the result is that it's also "protecting" adults who access the Internet from public libraries.
So I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Hm, actually, I think I let it lapse. Hm.
If you like some of their work but not all of it just send them a cheque for less than you would otherwise have. Say you like 50% of the work and you think a good donation is 100 bucks, so send them 50 bucks. Someone else will not like the 50% you support and can do likewise. If their views slip with time, year on year adjust the percentage. Include a covering letter of why your doing it, up or down, people listen most when their is money in the envelope. Some organisations have ways your can earmark for causes, if they do use it, and support people who give you the option, that way more will offer it in future. For example savefarscape.com has 2 different funds, one for risky stuff one for day to day stuff....
James
Though I don't think that their influence would be best described as "left" (though it fits the bill in a lot cases).
:)
They do, in fact defend most of the constitution, get the word out about the U.S.A. Patriot Act and whatnot, but when it comes right down to it, they're all a bunch of lawyers.
Tort reform (putting caps on civil court awards) is something they argue tooth and nail against, even though civil claims are at fault for most of the rise in medical costs, and rates for various types of insurance (doctors give on average 1/3 of their income to mal practice insurance, though 83% of successful claims are frivelous, and rising yearly).
A real, non-discriminatory defender of the constitutional, social, and economic freedoms is the libertarian party. Though I'm a bit bias according to my handle.
I fear nothing but my government. Vote Libertarian.
It all has to do with balance. We all know no citizen's liberty is safe while congress is in session. (Franklin I think) When it comes down to it, the main job of congress is to take away liberty by passing laws. Sometimes they get too caried away and somebody needs to be there to defend liberty. There are somethings I don't agree with (I won't enumerate those things here), but when it comes down to it, I support the majority of what they support. Otherwise, who's to stop congress from going overboard and taking it all away piece by piece?
What I'd like to know is why every American doesn't support the ACLU. The general feeling by many people is that they're bad. I can't think of a good reason why you would hate an orginization who's sole purpose is to defend freedom from those who would take it away from us. I once had an NCO (while I was in the military) bash me for supporting the ACLU. I reminded him that he said "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Of course the conversation went crazy from there (we were on a boring detail), but still... It's interesting to watch 'right wing' people bash the ACLU while calling the people who support them 'traitors' and whatnot. To me, not supporting the ACLU is treason against what our country stands for.
There was a case back in 88 that demonstrates the role of the ACLU in all its irony. If you remember that year, you probably remember Bush the First packing as many Hot Button Keywords into his presidential campaign speeches as possible. One really nasty example is that he repeatedly referred to his opponent as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", terminology obviously meant to evoke left wing associations.
Now somewhere in the midwest (I think it was Ohio) a woman tried to put "Elect Bush" signs on her front lawn, only to be told she was violating local zoning ordinances. She placed a call to the local ACLU chapter -- and got a callback from the state chairman, who informed her that she had raised a vital free speech issue, and the state ACLU would back her and her Bush signs with everything it had!
Of course, that's not the biggest irony connected with the ACLU -- it doesn't come close to all those Nazi and White Supremicist bozos who turn to the ACLU for legal representation, which often comes in the form of Jewish or African-American lawyers! But it's all part of the same idea: that for the Constitution to work, its protections have to be extended to everybody: pedophiles, Nazis, and even people who attack the ACLU itself.
Which makes association with the ACLU pretty difficult: you have to accept that your dues are going to go to protect the legal rights of a lot of people you happen to despise.
I actually have no problem with this: I'm a Jewish American who happens to think that everybody should read The Turner Diaries. The more appalling an idea is, the more you need to bring it out in the open. Anyway, freedom of thought (including stupid thought) is the most fundamental of rights.
I do have a major issue with the ACLU. Not their rabid defense of the rights of despised minorities, but rather their assumption that litigation is the only way to do it. Lawyers do play an important role in protecting the rights of their clients. But the courts aren't always the best protector of personal liberties. As Dred Scott learned, they often give a high priority to maintaining the status quo. And even when they don't, having a social change mandated by a federal judge is no guarantee of the change actually happening. Any African American trying to find a place to live will tell you that!
I think you're missing a key distinction in their position: they supported both sides's right to voice their opinion; but they opposed ones side's use of extortion to try to silence the other. Specifically, when the leaders of one side "directed activists involved in that group...to use threats and acts of intimidation and extortion in their efforts to shut down" the other group, the ACLU said that this crossed the line from speach to action and thus was not protected.
Basically, someone is allowed to think my nose is too big, and even to say publically that they think it's too big, but they aren't allowed to wave a knife in my face to make their point.
-- MarkusQ
I won't tell you not to send money to the ACLU, or where to send your money instead, but it sounds like you have pretty mixed feelings about it. Why not find an organization that you really feel strongly about? There are so many people out there trying to help other people in different ways, you could not possibly support all the good causes. So find one that you passionately support.
Maybe partying will help...
The classic example is the "right" to abort, which the ACLU promote. If you kill a baby after (s)he is born, it's murder. A week before (s)he is born, it's not. Why not? If (s)he were born 20 weeks premature, killing him/her a week later (ie, 18 weeks earlier than if (s)he'd been aborted a week before term) is also unquestionably murder. Ridiculous, isn't it?
So who will speak for those who have no voice? "We do," claim the ACLU: but here they do not speak for the baby, or the baby's rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" at all. Liars!
The only reasoning which could lead one to believe that a change of location (from inside a uterus to inside a nappy) includes a change of status from non-human "bunch of cells" to full humanity is a religious one. It calls itself Atheism but it isn't even that. The only liberty it defends is of those like themselves to believe and act as they do.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
God, it's like I'm arguing with a brick...
The speech in question in this case is not 'threats and extortion'. The NOW didn't sue the people who threatened the child-killers. They sued the political organization that motivated the protests to begin with.
I'm sure if someone committed a crime in the name of the ACLU, and the ACLU got sued under Federal racketeering laws, they would be screaming 'freedom of speech'. In this case, though, they're screaming 'right to abortion'.
They aren't protecting political speech; they're protecting their leftist political ideology. As I mentioned in another thread, though, their argument wasn't exactly successful.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Certain parts of the Constitution, yes. The First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment...
However, they are great about perverting the meanings of other parts, like the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
One tool that I've come to value in helping me decide what non-profit organizations to donate to and how much, has been the information put out by The American Institute of Philanthropy. They publish a Charity Rating Guide that lists pretty much every non-profit org that you can think of along with information on such things such as how much cash they have in reserve and what percentage of donor's contributions actually goes towards programs and what percentage goes towards paying the costs of fund raising. Let me tell you: the ACLU does not get high marks. Read the Guide for yourself to decide whether the marks are "high enough" for you to decide whether to give them money or save your contribution for a similar, but more efficient, organization.
Obviously many factors must go into your decisions but knowing some of their finances can really help you out. I have stopped giving to some non-profit orgs whose missions are strongly aligned with my own values based on the data I gleened from AIPs Guide. In fact, I actually gave some of that money previously reserved for other charities to AIP so they can continue doing their good work. I encourage all slashdotters to get a copy of the Guide.
GMD
watch this
I was listening to a radio report on the longstanding tradition in Texas of a prayer being read over the loudspeaker before a public high school football game. I was really trying hard to maintain some objectivity. There was a girl being interviewed who often read the prayer before the game, who was speaking very passionately about this being her religion, and that ACLU-spearheaded attempts to stop the prayer were interfering with her free exercize of it. Then the interviewer asked her: What if there was a Mormon or Buddhist student in her high school who wanted to read a prayer before a game?
"Oh, I wouldn't like that," she said. "I mean, we pray to God. I wouldn't want a prayer to a false god."
That's when I signed up for the ACLU. The thing that most pissed me off was the unthinkingness of it. I grew up in Buffalo, NY, which is overwhelmingly Catholic. If there were prayers in the public schools there, they would probably be Our Fathers and Hail Marys and calls for intercessions with saints -- all things that a good Southern Baptist like the girl being interviewed would find to be horrifying popery. The reason that governments (including school districts and their appointed representatives) shouldn't lead prayers is that by selecting certain prayers, they are declaring some gods to be false, just like our interviewee. And that is completely against the "no established religion" clause.
jf
I like the work that the ACLU does. I can even appreciate their stance on some issues where I disagree with them. After Sept. 11, I knew that Bad Shit (tm) would soon be coming from Washington, and they looked like the group that was most likely to do something.
I gave them $50 or so. In return, I started receiving weekly "Oh no! Those wacky republicans are at it again! Give us more money!" letters.
The info wouldn't have been bad: it's good to be informed. What bothered me was the hysterical "Be afraid!" tone, the constant pleading for money (with that sleazy "but wait, there's more!" tone that comes with offers for time-shares), and the regular deulge of thick envelopes (with a pre-paid business reply envelope in each). I suspect that the entirety of my donation was spent on the weekly pleas for more money. I felt like I was supporting the post office and the envelope industry, not civil liberties.
Now, I drop more money to the EFF, and I make a point of writing my congressmen when I think I can argue the issue intelligently. It's not the broad-based defense of liberty that I'd prefer, but it's less annoying that donating to the ACLU.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
What other group has that kind of history of being on the right side of an issue when it was very unpopular?
check it out here
Free cell phone tracking
I'm going to take the orignal poster's sentiment (or what I would presume is their take on this issue) and run with it.
... And they cannot make a law prohibiting your right to exercise your religion. Well, I don't think they've ever tried this either, and certainly not successfully. Some immature young lad out there probably wants to shoot back, "But I want to sacrifice virgins to the fire god!". Well, fine, but that's infriging on somebody else's right to live which flies directly in the face of any number of laws of the land and basically any law created by human civlization that I'm aware of.
Read the above quote a few times and let it sink in if you have the notion of "seperation of church and state" burried into your head.
Word #1: Congress
Congress is the legislative body of the United States of America. This is not your school board. This is written to prvent the federal legislative branch from:
Words #2 - #10:
Making a law respecting an establishment of religion. Period. Hey this is pretty plain and simple -- there's no legal jargon here. So far we have a statement that says that Congress cannot make a law which states an offical religion of the land. Congress has never (to the best of my knowledge) even tried doing this nor have they ever succeeded. We piss on the Constitution frequently but this is one bullet point that's never been trampled on.
Words #11 - 16:
Last I knew Congress never ordered prayers before football games, nor did they prohibit them. The judicial branch has taken the above statement though and turned it into "seperation of church and state" which is a horrible farce. The parent poster has stated, and this is true, that the founding fathers were openly religious. There is nothing wrong (morally or legally) with a representative in Congress, a senator, or a president from having and acting upon their religious beleifs unless they make it a law through the legislative branch. Period, end of story.
The 1st ammendment in no way, shape, or form can possibly be contrued from it's original writing to mean that there shall never be an intersection of religion and any "state" funded activity. The term "seperation of church and state" has always bugged me because the 1st ammendment specifically mentions a federal branch of the government and nowhere in the bill of rights are things actually prohibited to be done at the state level unless it trumps federal law.
As long as there is no law stating that there must be prayer at graudations, football games, or by a group of students before school: let them pray. Let them do it openly. Let them use community funds to it if that's what the community wants. The federal government shall make no law ever stating that it must be done or that it cannot be done.
If a Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or other community wishes to celebrate their religion on government owned property or during goverment sponsored events, FINE! Let them, I'll rejoice as an American that they have that right. Once you stomp on my communities freedom for a speaker at high school graduation to express his religious beleifs to the student body you've stomped on their rights though, and that just isn't kosher.
I don't know why I keep bringing up high school stuff -- it just seems the most prevalent in the news. It's municipal goverments of small communities were talking about here -- not federal laws. They can do what they want. The Bill of Rights is just that -- rights to citizens. Citizens make up communities. In their own little microcosims let them do what they want. Anything less is unconsitutional.
The judicial branch (and I forget when they did this) seems to have made great inroads with destroying clause #1 of the 1st ammendment. I'll never understand why Surpreme Cou
My beef with the ACLU centers around the Second Amendment. Not because I'm a gun-toting psychopath, but because our civil liberties are protected only to the degree that all of them are protected--including the ones we might disagree with. Regardless of whether you're pro-gun or anti-gun, the Second Amendment is still part of the Bill of Rights and is thus a civil right under American law.
The only problem is, the ACLU doesn't see it that way. Ask the ACLU why they have not once, not ever, taken a pro-Second Amendment case and you'll get the same answer every time: "because we believe the Second Amendment is a guarantee of the state's right to equip a militia, not the individual's right to possess firearms."
It would be an admirable sentiment, were it not for one fact... not one reputable legal scholar in America takes that position. Alan Dershowitz, a very far-left liberal Democrat lawyer and legal professor, has given the best analysis of why no reputable law professor has embraced this position.
According to Dershowitz, the Second Amendment reads "the right of the people..." The very instant you say "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then you've thrown the entire Bill of Rights out the window. If "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then what does that mean for any of the rights we cherish? Suddenly, we no longer have any individual rights; they're all held collectively by the state, which becomes our guardian, able to exercise our liberties in our name while not permitting us those liberties for our own use.
It's really a very 1984 example of doublespeak.
There is not one Supreme Court case which supports the collectivist interpretation of the Bill of Rights, either as a whole or for one specific amendment. In the most recent Supreme Court Second Amendment case, Miller v US, the Supreme Court explicitly recognized the Second Amendment as an individual--not a collective--right.
For the ACLU to claim that the Second Amendment is correctly read as a collective right is... I can't figure it out.
What I suspect is this: the ACLU has a lot of support from a lot of people who, while adamantly in favor of free speech and privacy and all manner of other things, are also staunchly in favor of the notion that nobody should have guns except the cops. And as a result of this, the ACLU has decided to cut the Second Amendment loose to fend for itself, on the theory that "it's better to lose one-tenth of the Bill of Rights than it is to piss off 95% of our contributors, and thus kill any good we can do for the nine-tenths that still remains."
Uh... no.
The "Founding Fathers," were generally Deists, not Christians. Deist beliefs are incompatible with Christianity. Deism, and the entire philosophy of Natural Rights, is an outgrowth of the Age of Reason that embraced a Creator that did not reveal itself by revelation but through its creation itself.
Let's look at what some of the best-known "founding fathers" said about Christianity, society, and Law:
- Thomas Jefferson : Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
- Ben Franklin:
"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works
... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity."
- Thomas Paine : The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles, which is a parody on the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the eastern world, is the least hurtful part."
- James Madison: "Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
- John Adams: As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?
Here are some other links on the whole "Founding Fathers were Christian" bogon:"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
It's been federal judicial dogma for a long time.
Technically correct, but not as right as you think you are. There's no doubt that it is centrally applicable to militias, but just because it's centrally applicable to militias does not mean that it's a collectively-held right. In all the reading on Second Amendment law that I've done, both pro- and con-, I have yet to find any respectable journal which has given the slightest shred of credibility to the collectivist interpretation.
Looking at Supreme Court jurisprudence in US v Miller, (1939, the most recent Second Amendment case) it's clear the Supreme Court considers the Second Amendment to be an individually-held right. Miller was convicted of possessing a sawn-off shotgun, not on the legal theory that the state has the exclusive right to control the possession of arms, but on the basis that a sawn-off shotgun possessed no military value the court could see. The Miller decision strongly indicates that if Miller had been carrying a Thompson submachinegun (a weapon with clear military value), he would've been acquitted on appeal.
For that matter, it's possible he would've won his case outright if he'd bothered to present a defense. The Miller appeal was done in absentia and ex parte, due to Miller not showing up for the appeal.
Anyway. The upshot of this is that neither the Supreme Court nor legal professors put a single shred of credit in the collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment. The ACLU is ethically lacking in that it would rather hide behind a discredited interpretation of the Second Amendment rather than own up to the fact the Bill of Rights has things in it which are offensive to a large portion of the ACLU's supporters.
Progressive Creationists are similarly not even remotely like Deists. Deists believe in a clockwork universe that was created and then abandoned, while Creationists generally believe in scriptural texts (the "supernatural revelation" referred to in the definition you quote) and other tinkering by the Creator.
I apologize for the low quality of the link I posted, googling will get you better info if you're interested. Deism is a fairly well articulated set of beliefs that grew out of the Enlightenment and doesn't resemble Christianity at all, except in the belief in a similar moral code (but the code of "natural rights" is derivable from the observed universe, instead of consisting of given commandments) and in a Creator.
Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and most of those referred to as the American "Founding Fathers" were Deists rather than Christians, and had some fairly nasty things to say about Christianity (Thomas Jefferson: "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." And Tom Paine, well, he specialized in denouncing Christianity).
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny