idealist.org

The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont is an organization of Vermonters dedicated to the defense of individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as the Vermont Constitution.

While the rest of the U.S. Constitution authorizes the government to act, the Bill of Rights sets limits. It describes what the government may not do. Even a democratically elected government is not permitted to take away from the people their inherent rights to freedom of expression, belief and association, to procedural fairness, to equal treatment before the law, to privacy.

The sole purpose of the ACLU is to protect these rights and to enforce the constitutional limits on government action. Without legal guarantees of individual liberty, even American democracy can revert to acts of tyranny, to a despotism of the majority. The ACLU exists to prevent this from happening, and to fight back when it does.