Information Wants To Be Free -- But The ACLU Prefers Certain Information Suppressed
When I was giving free advice on the street corner with two friends in New York City, a business was trying to run us off the corner. I called up Norman Siegel of the ACLU in New York and he helped us stand our ground. He told me, best I can recall, that we were even more protected that the curbside booksellers, because we were giving away information for free.

I was grateful and I'd long been grateful to the ACLU for defending free speech rights. Sadly, their mission seems to have been sharply warped.

In the Post Millennial, Libby Emmons writes:

A woman was interested to know how many inmates in Washington state identify as transgender, and how many of those transgender identified inmates have been given transfers to go from men's prison to women's prison, and the reverse. To get this information, she filed a Freedom on Information Act request. Instead of getting the information she requested, she got sued by the ACLU.

I thought this had to be a parody piece. In fact, it is not. Sadly, tragically, it is not:

To be clear, at no point had this woman contacted the ACLU to tell them she was filing a FOIA. She had used ACLU resources to figure out how to file a FOIA, but that was freely available on their website. The state of Washington is under no obligation to let the ACLU know about every FOIA request they receive, so it remains entirely unclear as to how the ACLU became aware of this woman's FOIA in the first place.

Nonetheless, instead of receiving the information she requested, she received an injunction. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a private citizen for requesting public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections on the number of inmates in state custody who identify as transgender and the number of male inmates who are housed in women's facilities.

The woman, who didn't want to be named given the sensitive nature of this peculiar situation, submitted her public records request on March 18, 2021.

...Yet by April 8, instead of the information she requested, she received an email that the ACLU of Washington Foundation and Disability Rights Washington, along with their clients "who are current and former transgender, non-binary, and intersex inmates and in the custody of Washington Department of Corrections," had personally named her in a lawsuit to prevent the information she requested from being released.

The email stated, "We have filed for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order and a Motion for Preliminary Injunction to prevent the disclosure of documents you have requested from the Department of Corrections."

The woman's request was straight-forward. She asked for:

"A complete and accurate count of inmates who identify as transgender," noting that this means a person who does not identify according to their biological sex, and she asked the Department of Correction to "break this information down by location."

She was interested to know the "number of inmates that have been transferred from a men's facility to a women's facility since January 01, 2021," as well as the "Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a women's facility."

She asked as well for the same information as regards biological women who identify as transgender and have requested, and been granted, transfers into men's prisons.

Why does the prison system in Washington not want this data released? And why is the ACLU fighting so hard against one woman who wants to know the truth? What do the state, and the ACLU, have to hide? And who do they think they are protecting? If they think they are protecting women from harm, they are wrong. Instead, they are protecting violent, biological males who seek access to women and who, the data might show if it were released, go on to harm, intimidate, and threaten these women.

Much of what is known about what is happening in women's prisons once the men move in is anecdotal, because powerful government agencies, and their apparent cohorts at the ACLU and other trans rights advocacy groups, simply don't want the information released. They prioritize the rights of biological males who identify as women over the rights of women who can't be anything other than what they are, and are particularly vulnerable do to the composition of their bodies.

WoLF is fighting the injunction, which aims to prevent the public from obtaining information about the number of male prisoners currently housed in women's prisons. They plan to fight this lawsuit, which is clearly aimed at suppressing citizen's rights to access public records.

WoLF Legal Director Lauren Adams said that, "It is troubling both that the ACLU is seeking to silence and intimidate an individual who is petitioning their government, as well as attacking the free press."

This is simply vile. Clearly, the ACLU's mission has changed from protecting free speech to protecting certain ideologies -- at the expense of free speech.

Please donate generously -- to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which will take free speech cases even of people whose views they find reprehensible. Which is what defending free speech is actually about.