(FORTUNE Magazine) – We sulkily declined to answer Ira Glasser's letter to the editor a while back (January 28), and had definitely planned to cease ''baiting'' the American Civil Liberties Union -- this being executive director Glasser's characterization of the highly factual reports we have occasionally served up on the ACLU. Ira says it is unfair to accuse the organization of ''bloody nonsense'' on the basis of only a few cases out of the thousands it gets involved in. Okay, fine. But having now pulled together a larger sample of news stories and articles (all appeared in January) about the ACLU and its % affiliates, we posit that the nonsense quotient is nothing like .000001% but something more on the order of 53%. These figures are admittedly still being firmed up. The nonsense quotient appears to receive especially generous support from ACLU positions on privacy. Here is a story datelined Springfield, Illinois, in which the ACLU is assailing a state law mandating AIDS testing for convicted prostitutes. A news story out of San Francisco concerns the ACLU's opposition to prison guards being told which inmates are HIV-positive (and would therefore present a special risk if, say, a fight had to be broken up). ''A person's medical history is private information,'' says the ACLU attorney. Here is another gem from Illinois, about a state proposal to install cameras in unmanned toll booths, so that motorists will feel a bit more pressure to pay the tolls. The local ACLU privacy protector calls it ''creeping fascism.'' But it's not just privacy. On the free speech front, we note the objection of the local ACLU chapter to regulations imposing fines on demonstrators who stop traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and hang banners from the span (as antiwar groups did last month); this would allegedly abridge the protesters' constitutional rights. We also found ourselves twitching upon reading the account of the huge bash thrown by the notoriously leftist Southern California ACLU that honored non-civil-libertarian-on-any-reas onable-definition Ed Asner (a crusader for the Sandinistas). There is also a passel of dismay-engendering stories about the ACLU's efforts to bar discrimination. Tops in this area, we would say, was the article in Society, a scholarly publication based at Rutgers. It was written by sociologist William A. Donohue, a well known critic of the ACLU. He opened by observing that ACLU policy would prevent a homeowner with a wife and two teenage daughters, who wished to make a little money by renting out space in the home, from turning down as a tenant a drug addict and rapist out on parole. The policy plank: ''Discrimination in the rental . . . of housing, public or private, based on race, color ((14 criteria omitted here)) . . . status as a . . . drug addict, or ex-offender, including a parolee, is a denial of basic civil rights.'' Several defenders of the ACLU responded to Donohue's article in Society but none claimed he had misstated the homeowner's predicament, and we await a letter to the editor explaining why the policy is not bloody nonsense.