PROVIDENCE

Steven Brown gets a lot of Christmas cards.

Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, keeps the most memorable ones scattered around his cramped office in a nondescript building on Dorrance Street.

The office is a mess, but Brown knows exactly where to find his favorite card, tucked within a pile of paper on his desk. The card is still enclosed in the festive red envelope it was mailed anonymously in last Christmas.

A drawing on the cover shows a teddy bear perched in a cozy wingback chair beside a roaring fire. A wreath hangs on the mantle above, flanked by red-and-white stockings.

Folded in quarters inside the card is a letter-size sheet of paper on which someone has taken great care to print a message for Brown.

“Jesus loves you,” it says in neat block letters above a black-and-white print of Christ.

The note continues inside the fold.

“Everyone else thinks you’re …” It ends with an unflattering characterization this newspaper will not print.

These disingenuous cards have been coming as long as Brown has run the ACLU’s Rhode Island affiliate, 29 years and counting. Some are witty digs at the “God-less ACLU.” Others tell Brown that his soul needs to be saved.

The affiliate has not endeared itself to Rhode Island’s Catholic majority with its fight to maintain the separation of church and state. It came to a head in 1980 with a memorable, if ultimately unsuccessful, bout over a crèche on city property in Pawtucket, and has continued with complaints over the years against other Rhode Island communities and their Nativity scenes.

The campaign against Christmas, as the ACLU’s critics would call it, has received more press than just about anything else the organization has done in Rhode Island since a group of lawyers and activists opened the local office in 1959 — 39 years after the national organization was founded in New York to fight for labor rights.

But that doesn’t mean the Rhode Island affiliate hasn’t found itself defending and offending plenty of other groups over the past 50 years.

The organization has fought for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, voting rights and immigrant rights, open records and open government, due process of law and equal protection of the law.

It has represented Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee; the Rhode Island State Rifle and Revolver Association and the Rhode Island Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights; the Urban League of Rhode Island and ex-Klansman David Duke.

Brown is the public face of the organization and, with his mustache and tousled hair, is as recognizable as any politician in the state.

He regularly puts in 12-hour days at the office. For the six months each year that the General Assembly is in session, he spends several more hours in the evenings lobbying at the State House. And on the weekends he can often be found in his office. “In religious terms, it’s a vocation for him,” says Elizabeth Morancy, a former Sister of Mercy who sits on the affiliate’s board.

It’s a winter day and Brown sits at a conference table in the ACLU offices politely arguing why a story should not be written about him.

Brown has appeared on the Phil Donahue Show and been quoted in The New York Times, Time Magazine and on Fox News. He regularly appears on local television and talk radio and his name has been in this newspaper thousands of times.

But that publicity has always been connected with civil rights and issues. Brown is comfortable talking about the intricacies of the First Amendment. He is not comfortable talking about himself.

Brown reluctantly agrees to cooperate, but in subsequent conversations he jokes, awkwardly and often, about having to get off the phone or having no time to meet.Do you have an opening tomorrow? he is asked one day.

“I hope not,” he says.

When he does sit down for an interview, he is ill at ease, smiling nervously and fidgeting with his hands.

Brown keeps a wall between his public and private lives. On one side, the one that faces the world, is his job: director of an organization that fights for its often unpopular or controversial interpretation of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.On the other is his private life: a modest house in suburban Barrington, a wife of 23 years who was once a nun and is now a public defender and a 21-year-old daughter who aspires to be an actress.

Steven Brown grew up in a working-class neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia with his parents, a younger sister and an older brother. His mother was a housewife and his father, a World War II veteran, spent his entire career as an administrator for the federal Social Security Administration.

His family was raised in the Jewish faith. Although Brown says he believes in God, he is not a practicing Jew. Neither parent had strong political views, but if anything they leaned to the right.

Brown came of age during the Nixon years. He was deeply affected by the Watergate scandal and the controversy surrounding the Pentagon Papers, events in which journalists played prominent roles.

In 1973, when Brown enrolled in Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., his goal was to become a newspaper reporter, but he grew more interested in political advocacy than journalism while volunteering for the local ACLU branch.

He graduated in 1977 with a degree in political science and returned home to work for the Philadelphia office. Several months later, a position opened up as director of the Iowa chapter. Brown, then 21, applied and got the job.

Brown spent 2½ years in Iowa but was itching to return to the East Coast. He took over the ACLU’s Rhode Island office in 1980.

In a Thanksgiving column in the Providence Phoenix last November, Mary Ann Sorrentino, the former director of the Rhode Island chapter of Planned Parenthood and a member of the search committee that selected Brown, said that finding him was a “miracle.”

It wasn’t long before Brown stepped into the middle of a controversy that captured national attention. Just months after he moved to Rhode Island, his office filed suit against the City of Pawtucket, which for years had displayed a city-owned Nativity scene at taxpayers’ expense.

“That was my baptism of fire,” Brown says now.

He was an unknown going up against a political heavyweight, Pawtucket Mayor Dennis Lynch, who has since passed away. But Brown went toe-to-toe with Lynch. When the mayor called the ACLU a “nefarious group” and said, “Every Christmas needs a Scrooge, and the ACLU is the Scrooge this year,” Brown countered by referring to Lynch’s “antics” and saying, “Ignoring the Constitution is often a good way to get votes.”

In 1981, the federal District Court, in Providence, sided with the ACLU, enjoining Pawtucket from including the crèche in its holiday display. The 1st Circuit of Appeals, in Boston, upheld the decision. But in a 5-to-4 decision on March 5, 1984, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts’ rulings.

Brown worried that communities throughout the country would test the ruling by displaying their own crèche. Instead, he says, the dispute stimulated a broader discussion about church-state issues. He is unrepentant and calls the lawsuit “the best case we ever lost.”

“Anytime you get government involved in religion, it will degrade the religion,” he says.

The Providence Rotary Club is gathered at the Marriott Hotel, in Providence, to hear a debate on illegal immigration between Brown and Robert Clark Corrente, then U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island.

The affiliate’s work on the issue has occupied much of Brown’s time lately. He tells the audience that the enforcement of immigration laws can result in distrust between police departments and minority communities.

“These are not simple issues,” Brown says. “There are no simple solutions.”

Although Corrente disagrees with Brown, the debate is good-natured. Corrente later says he has great respect for Brown.

“He’s smart,” Corrente says. “He understands the issues. He’s passionate about the issues.”

Terry Gorman, director of Rhode Islanders for Legal Immigration Enforcement, a vocal group that opposes illegal immigration, has a similar opinion.

“I don’t agree with almost everything he does,” Gorman says, “but I have to respect him for fighting as much as he does for the causes.”

Richard Zacks, a lawyer who argued cases for the affiliate in the 1960s and 1970s and is now treasurer of the national ACLU, says Brown is skillful at engaging in the issues without offending or being offended himself.

It may explain why the affiliate has battled with state politicians one day only to defend them the next. The list includes former Providence Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. While he was mayor, Cianci clashed with the ACLU over Nativity displays in front of Providence City Hall and his administration’s refusal to release public records. But the ACLU also defended Cianci’s right to remain in office after he was charged with felony assault in the 1980s and his right to run for reelection after his conviction.

Now a talk-radio host, Cianci, without irony, calls Brown “one of the checks and balances on the system.” Asked if he thinks Brown is unpopular because of the often controversial positions he takes, Cianci has a ready answer.

“If I want a ratings boost, I pick an unpopular topic, then I call Steve Brown up and let him talk,” he says.

Brown is not a lawyer, but he knows the law better than most people.

Miriam Weizenbaum, president of the Rhode Island Association for Justice — the state trial lawyers group — has consulted Brown on First Amendment issues, sometimes getting answers that she had never considered.

“To understand constitutional law you have to both understand the principle that is articulated and the reason for it. And then finally you have to understand that principle in our rapidly changing modern world. Steve understands all those components,” Weizenbaum says.

Carolyn Mannis, a lawyer who once worked in the affiliate’s office, says she would go to Brown for advice on constitutional issues before she’d go to a law professor.

“He knows constitutional law like nobody I’ve met in my entire life,” she says.

Brown reads U.S. Supreme Court decisions in his free time. And he reads literally every one of the more than 2,000 bills that are introduced in the General Assembly each year. Evidence can be found in the conference room of the ACLU’s offices where boxes containing copies of legislation line the walls. A poster in the room says, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

State Sen. Charles J. Levesque, vice-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Commission, calls Brown “the most diligent guy” in the State House. He says Brown knows the issues and is viewed as a resource by some and “a pain in the neck” by others. Levesque says that sometimes he gets frustrated with Brown’s adamancy when it comes to civil liberties.

“But I can’t think of an instance when it hasn’t produced better legislation,” Levesque, D-Bristol, Portsmouth, says.

The Rhode Island affiliate’s board has given Brown raises to compensate for his extra work. But each time, board members say, Brown argued against the salary increase and the board had to impose it. He is paid $89,470 a year, according to 2007 tax filings.

In the years that he has taken a vacation, Brown has limited it to one week, often at the same place, an inn on a New Hampshire farm. At a meeting in the 1990s, the board urged him to take some time off because they didn’t want him to burn out. “I still don’t think he ended up taking a vacation that year,” says Mannis who was on the board at the time.

Brown is a language whiz who loves puns and completes each day’s New York Times crossword, including the Saturday puzzle, the newspaper’s most difficult. He is persistent. Just days beforehand, he says, he finally figured out a puzzle published two months previously in which key answers had to be written backwards.

He is a movie nut and watches one nearly every other day after work — when the legislature is not in session. His favorite film is The Third Man, a black-and-white thriller written by Graham Greene and starring Orson Welles.

He owns a mini dachshund named Gracie and a rescued cat named Petey. On weekday mornings, he rides on the East Bay Bike Path.

After some prodding, he allows a reporter in his private office. Two drawings made by his daughter Rachel when she was in elementary school hang from a wall opposite the desk. One has the message, “ACLU is the Best,” written in rainbow colors and surrounded by stars. Another says, “Let’s hear it for the ACLU.”

“You can tell she was impressionable when she did that,” Brown deadpans.

Rachel Brown, a former Rhode Island Junior Miss, graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in May. She is the only child of Brown and his wife, Catherine Gibran, an attorney who works in the appellate division of the Rhode Island Public Defender’s office.

The couple met at a dinner party over a game of Trivial Pursuit. As Gibran tells it, she was playing on a team while Brown was playing alone. He won the game. They were married in 1985. She calls her 53-year-old husband “funny,” “square” and “quiet.”

“He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t swear,” she says. “He’s a really boring guy.”

Brown looks on, amused, as his visitor finishes reading the Christmas card. He knows the ACLU is controversial. But he is also quick to point out that the organization does the dirty work that others do not. He wonders how many people represented by the Rhode Island affiliate supported its mission before they walked through the door seeking help.

“It’s only once your rights are violated that you realize what an important organization the ACLU is,” Brown says.

Brown is able to separate himself, because he believes so strongly in the principles that he and his organization defend.

“There’s an old saying that the ACLU’s only client is the Bill of Rights,” he says. “It’s a cliché, but there’s a lot of truth to it.”

But doesn’t the criticism bother him? He is asked this question again and again in different ways over several months. He answers the same way each time.

“I don’t take it personally,” he says. “I’ve never taken it personally. You can’t in this job.”

As if to emphasize his point, he carefully slides the offensive card back in its red envelope.

“This one we’ll keep,” he says, flashing a boyish smile.

Some notable cases the RI-ACLU has been involved in:

•DeCenso v. Robinson, 1971: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Rhode Island state law providing salary supplements to parochial school teachers.

•Doe v. Israel, 1973: A successful challenge to a state anti-abortion law, which declared that “life begins at conception,” that was filed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

•Donnelly v. Lynch, 1984: The Pawtucket crèche lawsuit. See main story.

•Yang v. Sterner, 1990: A case settled in federal court on behalf of a Hmong family who objected on religious grounds to an autopsy of their son.

•Weisman v. Lee, 1992: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Providence public school’s practice of having an invocation and benediction delivered at a graduation ceremony.

•Duke v. Connell, 1992: A successful federal lawsuit challenging the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s decision not to place presidential primary contender David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member, on the state ballot.

•Lin Li Qu v. Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation, 2008: An ongoing federal lawsuit on behalf of the family of Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese national who died last August while in the custody of immigration officials after allegedly being denied medical assistance.

Some facts about the ACLU’s Rhode Island affiliate:

• Founded in 1959 by attorney Milton Stanzler and others

• Files lawsuits in response to complaints from members of the public, also actively lobbies for and against legislation at the State House

• Financed through membership dues and fundraising events

•Has an annual budget of $385,000

•Employees four people, including executive director Steven Brown

•Has about 2,400 members

•Seventy-five local lawyers take on cases for free on behalf of the affiliate.

•Has filed more than 600 lawsuits since its founding, and won 80 percent of those cases

akuffner@projo.com