The odd couple.

Byline: The Register-Guard

One of the most unexpected - some would call it downright bizarre - pieces of fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is the shift by some conservatives toward the American Civil Liberties Union. But the linkage is actually a natural one, connecting those who fear big government with an organization that doesn't hesitate to challenge big government.

The surprise stems in part from the fact that since its founding in 1920, when it defended people who protested American involvement in World War I and aliens accused of subversion, the right wing has viewed the ACLU as a tool of the political left. Despite the ACLU's controversial expulsion of communists from its board of directors in 1940, the group's defense of unpopular free-speech causes, such as the right of children of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag, has made it a consistent target of conservative hostility. In his 1988 presidential campaign, then-Vice President George Bush accused Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts of being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU."

The ACLU has riled people on the left as well, notably with its defense of the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill., in 1978. But its involvement in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925 and its defense of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 ensured early on that most fire would come from the right. The long-standing conservative animus continues to be fed by the ACLU's periodic challenges of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations on public property, to a monument to the Ten Commandments in a Maryland park, to attempts by public libraries to employ computer filters that block sexually explicit material from children, and to drug sweeps that the group contends are racially motivated.

But the current Bush administration's enthusiastic embrace of anti-terrorism tools that threaten to intrude upon privacy and other civil liberties - such as the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, which could empower Americans to nose into their neighbors' affairs - have raised concerns among conservatives whose credo is that government should be less involved in citizens' lives.

Vividly illustrating this shift in attitudes is the news that U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., both staunch conservatives, may serve as consultants to the ACLU when their congressional terms end next month. Moreover, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., one of Congress' most outspoken conservatives, said of the organization: "I'm glad the ACLU raises the objections it does, because it forces the government and Congress to be mindful of First Amendment rights."

Such praise and involvement from prominent conservatives reflects a wider feeling among Americans that the administration's homeland war on terrorism has troubling aspects. The ACLU now sports a dues-paying membership of 330,000 - 50,000 of whom signed up after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Conservative support for the ACLU could help create awareness that civil liberties are not a matter of partisan politics, but belong to all Americans, whether of the right, left or center. This lesson is all too often learned only in retrospect, as is shown by the ACLU's then-unpopular but now universally praised struggle against unwarranted prosecution of African Americans in the 1930s and its challenges to the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.

The ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, puts the new conservative-ACLU link this way: "Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization ... . When you have the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country [U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft] saying either you're with me or against me, and that your tactics aid the terrorists, that rubs people the wrong way." The ACLU's membership climb and its appeal to increasingly diverse supporters strongly suggest that he's right.