Interview with Chris Link, Outgoing Executive Director of the Ohio ACLU
By: Seán Nestor
Tags: ACLU, Civil Liberties, Ohio, Abortion, Prison Reform

This article originally appeared in an edited form in the June 27, 2017 issue of the Toledo City Paper.

Chris Link (center) served as Executive Director of the Ohio ACLU for 27 years. She retired in May 2017.

We recently caught up with Chris Link, Executive Director of the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who retired after 27 years in that capacity at the end of May. We reflect back at her roots as an advocate for abortion access, stop to discuss her work fighting the prison-industrial complex, and look ahead at the fight for immigrant rights under the Trump administration.

Prior to working at the ACLU, you worked for Planned Parenthood and NARAL. What inspired you to take up work fighting for civil liberties, especially reproductive rights?

The times. I went to a Catholic girl’s school from 1966 to 1970 that changed overnight from discipline and rigidity to the nuns organizing anti-war rallies! The Catholic Church was in the midst of something called liberation theology, and that was very influential. Most of the old nuns that used to beat us with rulers were gone, and the new teachers were only 25 and gave us this view of compassion and humanity. So, I got rid of the God stuff and kept that part.

In college, before abortion became a legal practice, I became involved the underground abortion movement in Northeast Ohio. We helped women with transportation to Buffalo. Later, I helped start the first one of the first abortion clinics in Cleveland, called National Health Care. And of course we were all involved in anti-war stuff — you know, we hardly went to class back then, and faculty hardly ever showed up! We were all in the movement.

How have things changed since you first became Executive Director in 1990?

There are practical things like technology. In the old days, we would type up press releases, run them off, and drive around town handing them out to all the media outlets. Now, we can type them up on laptops anywhere in the world and spread it through social media.

I’m sorry to say that on first amendment work the courts have moved away from the idea of separation of church and state toward the idea of accommodation. For example, you’re not allowed to put a picture of Jesus in a public school- however, if you collect pictures of all the leaders of all the religions and put them up in the hallway at a public school, that’s allowed. This country was founded on the need for separation of church and state because of the experiences of our European ancestors. Democracy thrives in an environment where nobody gets to invoke God.

A focus of the Ohio ACLU in recent years has been for-profit prisons. What motivated that?

Our work on for-profit prisons is just one star in a constellation under a universe called mass incarceration. Under mass incarceration, we have the Prisons for Profit campaign, the School to Prison Pipeline campaign, the Debtors Prison campaign, and we’re just developing the Bail Reform campaign. All of that is derived from Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” which we as an organization embraced five years ago and has now been in two five-year strategic plans.

What is the Ohio ACLU doing to protect vulnerable immigrant populations under the Trump administration?

With the Muslim ban, we had lawyers at every international port of entry. We had lawyers in Washington and New York doing a hotline for any lawyer who called us. We had lawyers calling us from all over the state, because Ohio has a lot of colleges and universities, and many universities have large immigrant populations. In addition, there is a federal prison in Youngstown that is now being used as a detention center for refugees who have sought and were granted asylum, but were rounded up by the Trump administration. People of all nationalities. Our legal department started a training program for volunteer attorneys in conjunction with a professor from University of Akron, so that we could act as a source providing lawyers to represent people who are languishing in this prison.

Over the course of your 27 years at the ACLU, which fight would you say you are most proud of?

Establishing rights for homeless people. All across the state, cops would arrest them, harass them, take their stuff. They weren’t allowed to fall asleep on a bench. Near Christmas, retail establishments in the big cities would ask the police to get rid of them, so they would round them up and drive them far away, dumping them in industrial areas. So we led the fight with a large group of these cases in the 1990’s that set a lot of precedents, including getting them the right to vote (since you needed an address to register.)

What will you miss most about working for the ACLU?

The people, of course. I grew up in a small country town. All I wanted out of college was to meet people who were different — different races, a variety of professions — and joining the ACLU just exploded my world.

Our membership has certainly grown. After 9/11 we had 6,000 members. Before Trump, we had 8,000. Now we have 30,000 members.

In the last decade, an onslaught of anti-choice legislation has passed through the Ohio legislature, making our state a key battleground in the fight for abortion access. Eight clinics have closed in the last seven years, including Toledo’s own Center for Choice. What is the ACLU currently doing to protect women’s right to choose?

We’ve been lead counsel or group counsel in almost every major case affecting abortion and reproductive rights. We have a case that’s still pending around the single subject rule of the Constitution. It’s really important because it addresses a very corrupt practice, which is if you want to do something that is very unpopular, hide it in the biennial budget, which is over 1,000 pages.

No civil liberties issue is ever really won. As soon as you fix the problem in Cleveland, they’re going to start doing it in Youngstown. The rights that we secure for people have to be constantly reinforced.

How has Ohio changed since you first became Executive Director of the ACLU?

The erosion of first amendment rights is certainly the saddest thing I’ve seen. The great thing is that people are starting to think about race in the criminal justice system much more.