I never said it was. And that completely misses the point on why it's important. (surprise: you don't have to defend Charlottesville to defend the ACLU)
You're basically providing anyone an easy tool to kill any protest before it gets off the ground.
Any protest where antifa plays a role would be DOA (and having attending my fair share that's at least ~50% of the major ones)... do you think all the human rights, union, indigenous, etc groups control which protests Antifa shows up at? Should they have to self-regulate their protests so no one shows up wearing all-black is allowed to participate?
Anyway you're free to stop supporting ACLU if you prefer a political-driven legal group. I'm sure they exist. ACLU lost 30,000 members after Spokane but was still a force to be reckoned with for decades. I'm just saddened to see this short-term thinking also infecting lawyer groups and famous rights-defending academic institutions. I'm not surprised to see it in the media, Reddit, and elsewhere where higher values aren't embedded in their purpose.
The courts should always be the last line of defence and at a minimum should be immune from politics. Without politically neutral legal defence groups the world will be far worse off than the benefits of stopping a few nazis from protesting.
I followed their work for years and supported them for a long time. I'm saddened to see them shift in this direction.
Of course they should self-regulate - or at least make it very clear when the presence of violently-inclined groups isn't welcome to the organizers. Because the alternative is that the government will regulate those protests instead, which would be a lot worse.
Obviously the organizer didn't go to court and say, "I would like the right to commit violence, can you please give me that right because free speech." But he did go to court and say "Me and my militia buddies who are hoping for a civil war and are bringing their guns would like to hold a rally at this crowded location where police can't keep things under control, and the city said that we can hold a rally at this less-crowded location instead, can we have our original location please?" and the ACLU defended that.
I think we're too far off-topic to argue about whether my view of Unite the Right is true or not - but I think I've set out a coherent position about principles (and, in particular, if my view is wrong on the facts, then I am in favor of the ACLU's support on principle.) I think you'll find that I am, in fact, opposed to most riots and do not believe there is an unalienable civil right to riot. I do believe in the right of people to protest even if there's a violent faction you can't do anything about. (And, in particular, I don't believe that information in retrospect about the violence of a given protest is relevant. I would still hold the same position if nobody had died or even been injured at Charlottesville, because of the information we knew beforehand. That is, my position rests on it the ACLU having been wrong at the time they filed the suit, not after the fact, which is a good part of why I don't think they've learned anything from it.)