INSIDE “VOICE,” WINTER 2008

Don’t miss what this renowned attorney and civil libertarian has to say on May 8!
  • His words have swayed US Supreme Court justices, influenced members of Congress and inspired countless constitutional law students: This year’s ACLU of Georgia National Award winner and Bill of Rights Dinner keynote speaker is...
  • The ACLU of Georgia gets 500 requests for help each month: How does a surgeon help our attorneys determine which cases to take on?
  • Seven anti-freedom, anti-immigrant bills flood the Georgia General Assembly.
  • In Case You Missed It: Important ACLU of Georgia news items from the past quarter
  • Calendar of Events

Continued from “Voice,” WINTER 2008:

PASS THE SALT AND TAKE THE FLOOR: Family dinner-time discourse ties into a generational passion for righting wrongs

From left: Beth Tanis, Ben Chandler and John Chandler

Huge issues are at stake, the most critical being if the Supreme Court says Congress has the right to take away habeas corpus.

“This is the most important civil liberties decision in decades,” John Chandler says. “The ACLU focuses on the Bill of Rights, but if the government has the right to pick you up and hold you in prison with no right to a hearing, then free speech is irrelevant.”

What’s the next step for people who care about these issues and the impact they’ll have for generations?

“People need to contact their legislators and have a public voice,” Beth says. “Political pressure is much more effective right now than the justice system.”

PUBLIC VOICE GROWS FROM PRIVATE VOICE

For years studies have shown that kids from families who eat dinner together are less likely to become substance abusers. New studies show even more: kids develop better verbal, listening and empathy skills when dinner conversation is complex and rich with explanation, storytelling, definitions and details.

“We still get a fair amount of feedback from our kids’ friends,” Beth says. “They say, we just don’t talk about anything interesting in our house — we love coming over to your house. You’re really interested in what each other does and their views.” However, their youngest daughter, Carrie, wasn’t always a fan. “She despised our dinner-table conversations, complaining that all we ever talked about was politics and legal issues and boring stuff like that. She felt out-shouted,” Beth says.

However, now that Carrie is a freshman at DePaul University, Beth says she feels quite comfortable in conversations about substantive issues. Like his dad and stepmom, Ben has strong views about politics and the work he’s doing on behalf of non-citizens who are caught in the US legal (or quasi-legal) system. He shares these views with his family, of course, even though dinners together are less frequent since they live on different coasts.

Ben says, “Fear and anger are taken out on different groups — there’s a lot of scape goating going on. We have a long history of this, if you think back to the Chinese Immigration Act. Personally, I feel a lot of this is thinly veiled racism.”

This is the passion that fueled his volunteerism when he was younger and now fuels his career, which he finds challenging and rewarding despite the everyday tasks that must also be done to help run the Immigrants Rights Project office.

“I know what I’m doing is valuable,” says Ben Chandler. “My work is leading to some important changes and helping some really brilliant lawyers help the most vulnerable people in our society… basically by suing the government!”

An interesting new development: Ben is now interviewing and hiring his own ACLU summer interns. “It’s come full circle,” he says.


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If you or someone you know is struggling with a civil liberties issue that other ACLU members might want to read about in our newsletter, please let us know. Contact Verna Barksdale at vbarksdale@acluga.org.

Beth Tanis and John Chandler are attorneys with Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP and have exceptional credentials.

John has served as president of the Atlanta Bar Association and other professional organizations and has been involved with many more. He’s been recognized with numerous awards and prominent listings, including Chambers USA America’s Leading Business Lawyers.

Beth chairs one of her firm’s subcommittees, is recognized in The Best Lawyers in America, 2003- 2007 among many other publications and sits on several boards, including Board of Directors of the ACLU of Georgia. She is also the current the Presi- dent of the ACLU Foundation of Georgia.

Ben Chandler made volunteering a large part of his pre-career life, starting with work he did with his church’s soup kitchen and food bank, then working with the homeless population and Project Open Hand, and against the death penalty. He graduated with a degree in history and has been with the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project for seven months.