So then the ACLU found out, and we sent the school district a letter. Three hours later, Dorothy Bond was unemployed.

Dan Savage says: ”The ACLU means business, and they will fuck you up.”

What a way to end the week. I’ll be walking on air all the way home.

As we approach the end of the tax year, I thought I’d share a brief list of the charitable organizations I personally support.  Some of you can probably afford to make much larger gifts than I can, and I’d encourage you to give generously to support these causes.

1. Humane Farm Animal Care

While I am a meat eater, I don’t see why eating an animal after it’s dead requires that it be tortured while alive. Food labels like Certified Organic, Pasture-Fed, and Free Range are essentially meaningless these days, but one label can be trusted to say that the animal you’re eating was not made to suffer throughout its life: Certified Humane.  These labels come only from the folks at HFAC, and they are rigorous in enforcing strict criteria before they’ll give out the label.

I will admit that I don’t always buy Certified Humane, but that’s because it’s still difficult to find.  Supporting this organization will help raise awareness, and that will make Certified Humane products much easier to find.  You can learn more and donate through HFAC’s web site.

2. Cell Motion Biobus

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZpFENgX9uI

Founded by an old friend of mine (now apparently known as “Doctor Ben“), the Cell Motion Biobus is a mobile science classroom that travels New York City, bringing sound science education, taught by PhD scientists, to students whose districts can’t afford expenses like microscopes and computers.

You may have seen the Biobus on the Colbert Report in March, when they stole Stephen’s blood.  The organization reaches about 20,000 people a year, and they operate on a shoestring.  You can learn more, volunteer, and make a much-needed donation at their web site.

3. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Pennsylvania

As if I would forget my employer.  As I’ve been known to say, I work for the ACLU because I support the cause, and not vice-versa.  The ACLU was the first charity I ever donated to, back when I was about 17 years old.  It is no exaggeration to say that the ACLU has not only defended, but in fact shaped the U.S. Constitution.  Did you know that no court ever upheld a free speech claim until the ACLU started arguing cases?

I view the ACLU as the world’s most important non-profit organization, and every American, whether they support the ACLU or oppose it, benefits from the ACLU’s 90 years of work.  Your gift to the ACLU is shared equally between the National organization and your state affiliate, no matter where you send it.

Incidentally, if you are one of those people who hates the ACLU, I’d invite you to learn more – particularly the articles on Snopes, and a list of the ACLU’s real work defending Christianity.  Most people who hate the ACLU have entirely the wrong idea about what we do, because unfortunately there are a lot of people out there telling outright lies about the organization.

This was a banner year for Christmas cards at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.  We didn’t keep an exact count, but the total was somewhere over 500 cards.  Of those 500, perhaps twenty were kind thoughts from people who like us.  The other 480 or so were angry, angry, angry.

In case you’ve missed it, there is an annual campaign to bury the ACLU under Christmas cards.  A chain email that’s been circulating for a decade or more insists that if we get enough Christmas cards, we’ll have to spend all of our time and resources opening them (just in case they contain money!) and won’t be able to do anything else with our time.  Shades of “Miracle on 34th Street,” I suppose.

This is all under the mistaken impression that the ACLU is fighting a War on Christmas, that we’ve told Macy’s and other department stores that we’ll sue if they wish shoppers a Merry Christmas, and that we’re somehow campaigning to have the Christmas Tree re-branded the “Holiday Tree.”  It’s all a bunch of nonsense, of course.  None of those claims are true, and we think people should be free to celebrate whatever holiday celebration appeals to them – just that the government shouldn’t be in the business of dictating what holiday that is.

So I present for you a gallery of a few favorite Christmas cards we received this year.  As a nerd who has recently been studying a lot of ancient and Classical societies, I have to say that I especially enjoy the frequent theme that “it’s ALWAYS been a CHRISTMAS tree.”  Perhaps a brief course in Western Civilization would be beneficial…

On January 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments in Miller, et al. v. Skumanick, a child pornography case that, oddly, involves no child pornography. The case goes back to 2006, when two girls aged 12 were photographed by another friend on her digital camera. The two girls were depicted from the waist up, wearing bras. In a separate situation, our third client was photographed as she emerged from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her waist and the upper body exposed. Neither of the photos depicted genitalia or any sexual activity or context. In 2008 the girls’ school district learned that these and other photos were circulating, confiscated several students’ cell phones, and turned the photos in question over to the Wyoming County district attorney, George Skumanick, Jr.

Skumanick sent a letter to the girls and their parents, offering an ultimatum. They could attend a five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and “non-traditional societal and job roles.” They would also be placed on probation, subjected to random drug testing, and required to write essays explaining how their actions were wrong. If the girls refused the program, the letter explained, the girls would be charged with felony child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

Nineteen families received these letters. Sixteen consented to re-education. Three decided their girls would benefit more from a lesson in constitutional law than from Skumanick’s views on “‘what it means to be a girl in today’s society,”‘ and called the ACLU of Pennsylvania. In March 2009, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing Mr. Skumanick and the Wyoming County, Pa., district attorney’s office from going ahead with any prosecution. Now it falls to the Court of Appeals to decide whether the DA’s office (Skumanick lost his bid for re-election in November) can proceed with prosecution.

This case has branded as the “‘Sexting Case,”‘ and headlines ask questions like “‘Sexting: Child porn or child’s play?“‘ But this case has nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with pornography. This is a case of a government official using the law to force his personal morals on others. Last February, Skumanick told a group of students and parents that he had the authority to prosecute a girl for being photographed in a bikini on a beach, because the photo was “provocative.” In their brief to the 3rd Circuit, the DA’s office asserts their opinion that no person could exchange such photographs for any other reason except sexual gratification. Their attorney reasserted this right before the court, stating that a minor’s transmission of any photograph of herself containing any nudity is never protected under the First Amendment.

Even if the photographs in question could be construed as pornographic, Skumanick lacked any evidence that the girls had transmitted the photos. His only basis for probable cause, in the words of their attorney, was “‘the presence of [those] photographs on the cell phones of [their] classmates.”‘ It was this lack of probable cause that led to the initial restraining order.

Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.”

Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education. Instead the girls are threatened with felony charges and life-long registration as sex offenders. To apply such a penalty, designed to protect minors against exploitation, is a grotesque misapplication — and that’s once again assuming that the photographs in question could possibly be construed as pornographic. In reality, there was no way such charges would ever stick, and the DA’s office had to know this. The child porn charges were merely a threat, to force the parents to subject their children to Skumanick’s moral view of the world, where any and all child nudity is illegal and bras and bikinis are pornographic.

Instead these parents asserted their constitutional right to dictate the upbringing of their children; their right to say “‘we don’t think this was wrong, and we’re not forcing our children to put that in writing, and we’re not forcing them to attend your re-education session,”‘ without fear of retribution from the DA’s office. It is certainly important, in this era of Facebook and Twitter and text messaging, that children learn the consequences of sharing digital photographs of themselves, but as ACLU of Pennsylvania legal director Witold Walczak puts it, “prosecutors should not be using heavy artillery like child-pornography charges to teach that lesson.”

The DA’s office argues that the federal court had no place issuing a restraining order, and that the proper procedure would have been to allow the prosecution to go forward and for the girls to mount a constitutional defense against the charges — but the prosecution itself was the threat. The agony of a felony prosecution, of hiring attorneys and mounting a defense, of the media attention surrounding the prosecution of a 16-year-old girl as a child pornographer were, in Walczak’s words, “the Sword of Damacles,” the threat of retribution if these parents refused to turn their children over to Skumanick.

The central question of this case was perhaps best framed by Judge Thomas L. Ambro during 3rd Circuit arguments: “Should we allow the state to force children, by threat of prosecution, to attend a session espousing the views of one particular government official on what it means to be a girl?”