The ACLU and Cuba

Alan Sears has a great article at Townhall.com about the ACLU, Cuba, and the controversy over the children’s book, “Vamos a Cuba”.
Excerpts:

Just as a leopard cannot change its spots, nor a zebra its stripes, an organization whose founder admired the “ideals” of the hammer and sickle can never really abandon those destructive beginnings.
In 2005, for example, the ACLU endorsed an amendment lifting the ban on tourist travel to Cuba – a long-distance slap in the face to Cubans, who now watch foreign tourists feed corruption, pesos and dollars to the Communist machine, while they themselves are stripped of nearly all human rights. The insult was multiplied a year later, when the ACLU demanded an end to bans on academic travel, so scholars could lend their support to the regime.
But ACLU leaders are as eager to export Cuban communism as they are to import American tourist dollars. Last week, the ACLU was in federal court, arguing that a Miami-Dade County school board broke the law by removing from its school libraries a book entitled Vamos a Cuba (Let’s Visit Cuba), which offers a strangely luminous view of life in Castro’s island “paradise.” A federal judge has already ruled that the book be returned to the shelves until the case can play out in court
Obviously, the Miami children targeted for this book have never been told that questioning the Cuban government is likely to lead to imprisonment … that milk is far too expensive for most on the island to purchase … that access to everyday activities like surfing the Internet is not only severely limited, but closely monitored by the government for any shred of dissent against Castro and his cronies.
Absent from the pages of Vamos a Cuba is any mention of the ruthless 20-year prison sentences levied on Cuban poets and journalists and priests who failed to fawn over their fearless leader. Instead, the book depicts Cubans as living as freely as they please.
Incredibly, the ACLU claims that removal of these fictions somehow violates students’ constitutional rights to “access of information.” That’s right: your kids have a constitutional right to absorb misinformation. If a pro-Communist wants to lie about the impact of the Party on the people, your tax dollars should encourage children to read those lies.
Of course, this same “right to access” doesn’t apply to information that the ACLU’s intolerant agenda deems misleading. They’re not nearly as interested in allowing both evolution and intelligent design to be discussed in science classes, or in letting a student who disagrees with homosexual behavior present his views openly and peacefully to a fellow student. It’s doubtful that a biography stressing John Paul II’s resistance to Communism, a children’s book stressing the importance of having both a mommy and a daddy, or, of course, a revisionist view of the impact of the ACLU would make the organization’s suggested reading list for Florida public schools – or the subject of an ACLU lawsuit to protect children’s “access.”

Read the entire article at Townhall, and there’s more at the Free Republic.