Go back and read the item in question. The argument the ACLU is making is based on the idea that the first freedom mentioned is "freedom of speech", it is not.

"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or the free excercise thereof" is the basis for the oft-cited right to "freedom of religion" or, as so many would have it "freedom from religion". Unless you are prepared to say that we do not in fact have freedom of religion, that we can, in fact, be forced to join a specific, government certified religion, [this] argument does not hold.

Nevertheless, I think what the ACLU is saying is dangerous in this instance. If, as they posit, freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment, we do not in fact have freedom of religion,

It is probably no accident that freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment:

"I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty."

1. It is not irrelevant that the Bill of Rights submitted to the states in 1789 included not only what are now the first ten Amendments, but also two others. Indeed, what we call the First Amendment was only the third one of the list submitted to the states. The initial "first amendment" in fact concerned the future size of the House of Representatives, a topic of no small importance to the Anti-Federalists, who were appalled by the smallness of the House seemingly envisioned by the Philadelphia framers. The second prohibited any pay raise voted by members of Congress to themselves from taking effect until an election "shall have intervened." See J. Goebel, 1 The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States: Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801, at 442 n.162 (1971). Had all of the initial twelve proposals been ratified, we would, it is possible, have a dramatically different cognitive map of the Bill of Rights. At the very least, one would neither hear defenses of the "preferred" status of freedom of speech framed in terms of the "firstness" of (what we know as) the First Amendment, nor the wholly invalid inference drawn from that "firstness" of some special intention of the Framers to safeguard the particular rights laid out there.