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Gabe Galanda: Shame on ACLU for defending racist NFL mascot

Monday, March 9, 2015

Activist Winona LaDuke speaks at a rally against racist mascots in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 2, 2014. Photo from Simon Moya-Smith / Facebook

Attorney Gabe Galanda criticizes the American Civil Liberties Union for submitting a brief that defends trademark protections for the Washington NFL team's racist mascot:

The ACLU is the most valiant and effective defender of the First Amendment; we are grateful. They are so formidable that the mere filing of the ACLU’s amicus brief could foretell victory in U.S. District Court for Dan Snyder.
Beyond that fear, there are primarily two troubling things about the ACLU’s support of the R*****ns trademark.
First, the ACLU downplays the impact of the R word by merely describing it as “outdated, racist language.” But they fail to appreciate that the word is not just racist–it connotes genocide, defined as: "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. synonyms: mass murder, mass homicide, massacre; annihilation, extermination, elimination, liquidation, eradication,decimation, butchery, bloodletting; pogrom, ethnic cleansing, holocaust"
Would the ACLU advocate for free speech protection for a trademarked term that casts light on the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz? Or that includes the N word vis-a-vis the massacre of Africans during American slave trade? Or that plays on sexual mutilation of Rwandan women? I would hope not.

Get the Story:
Gabe Galanda: Shame On You, ACLU, For Defending Dan Snyder’s “Racist” Trademark (Galanda Broadman Blog 3/8)