Even two decades ago, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took firm stances on First Amendment issues of all kinds and at every point on the political spectrum. But now it has relegated religious liberty in particular to secondary status, sometimes actively supporting laws that would restrict it. Tim Schultz writes:

There are honorable exceptions, but the ACLU and many of its allies on the left are now increasingly hostile to actual religious freedom, which includes the ability to exercise one’s beliefs openly in the public square and not just within the narrow confines of a place of worship.

Examples abound:

The ACLU launched a lawsuit that would force most of the nation’s religious adoption agencies out of business, limiting the difficult choices facing birth mothers and forcing children into a broken government-run system. An advertising campaign coinciding with the lawsuit makes no policy arguments, but instead relies on cartoonish portrayals of Christian adoption workers as violent bigots.

The California legislature passed a bill (with strong ACLU support) that would require churches and faith-based charities to employ people who procure abortions. The bill was too extreme even for the liberal governor Jerry Brown, who wisely vetoed it.

Democratic Senators—with well-coordinated public relations help from the ACLU—declared as unfit for government service a Catholic judicial nominee and an evangelical deputy cabinet secretary based upon beliefs that tens of millions of American Catholics and evangelicals would recognize as their own. . . .

Consider the implications of the ACLU’s position that religious freedom is perfectly fine so long as it does not come into conflict with any other important right or value. If that thinking were applied to other constitutional freedoms, it would render the Bill of Rights meaningless. How much freedom of speech or of the press would there be if it were allowed only when it didn’t give offense?

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.