Patterico's Pontifications

9/28/2021

ACLU: Yeah, Maybe We Screwed Up By Altering a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quote to Make Every Reference to Women Gender Neutral

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:29 am



The other day, the ACLU gave us this goofy tweet:

They now, shockingly, are apologizing:

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday that he regretted that a tweet sent out recently by his organization altered the words of a well-known quote by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The A.C.L.U. tweet, which was sent out Sept. 18, changed Justice Ginsburg’s words, replacing each of her references to women with “person,” “people” or a plural pronoun in brackets. Justice Ginsburg, who died last year, is a revered figure in liberal and feminist circles and directed the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project from its founding in 1972 until she became a federal judge in 1980.

The tweet by the A.C.L.U. occasioned mockery and some anger on social media from feminists and others.

“We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

The editing was part of a language jihad amongst the hyper-woke to redefine words such that “men” can get pregnant — therefore if RBG talked about “women’s” reproductive rights, she was being a bigot and needed to be corrected. Many wokesters have a Humpty Dumpty attitude towards the language: when they use a word, it means just what they choose it to mean. You can put an elephant in your fridge if you call a beer an “elephant.”

We’re headed that way. We just haven’t quite gotten there yet, as the ACLU apology shows.

For a good, balanced discussion of the issue of gender identity and language, check out Coleman Hughes’s discussion with Helen Joyce, whose recent book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is available on Amazon. I just ordered it on Kindle.

21 Responses to “ACLU: Yeah, Maybe We Screwed Up By Altering a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quote to Make Every Reference to Women Gender Neutral”

  1. It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or ” doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

    A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

    ‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

    Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

    ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

    George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  2. Liberals have a playbook. They are showing it to you every time they do something like this.

    Hoi Polloi (093fb9)

  3. White Obama superfans.

    nk (1d9030)

  4. The “tranzi” movement is entirely the result of white male overachievers overdosing on porn late in life and wanting to prove they can do it again as a ‘womxn’ by overwriting their own personal save file.

    In order to do this, they collude with the Criminal Organization Known as the Democratic Party to promote synergy and antisexism in personal state record-keeping, mandatory 8-hour antibullying sessions for all employees, celebrity Lifestyle Affirmation Influencers of all ages tied to that specific manufactured identity, and Active Online Hatecrime Reporting Agents for anyone who uses the wrong terms. Because the liberal Democrats find these tools useful to themselves otherwise, they support this wholeheartedly and have even put tranners on top of their victim totem pole whenever possible.

    Naturally, liberal Republicans have been completely useless in sounding the alarm and protecting the innocent normal people caught up in the teeth of all of these tools, either because they themselves share the same fetishes or they’re afraid of opposing their paymasters who use those tools themselves.

    Turd McDonald (978ee8)

  5. You really can’t satire the ACLU at this point.

    Demosthenes (4cc951)

  6. You mean like Carlsberg Elephant?

    steveg (e81d76)

  7. Or Chang?

    steveg (e81d76)

  8. Is Clinesmith doing his public service hours at the ACLU working for the digital team?

    “We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

    Ummm but you all did change the quote and then you personally “took responsibilty” by bizarrely blaming the digital team as if they don’t work for the ACLU thus washing your hands, digitally.

    Hard to believe people still think lawyers are weasels

    steveg (e81d76)

  9. I think glenn greenwalt’s reporting of news media spiking the hunter biden lap top story is more important.

    asset (8cf2c4)

  10. They’re not the only ones:

    “In the examination room, Chong said, doctors and attendants should use gender-neutral terminology and avoid terms like “ovaries” and “uterus.” “You can just say reproductive organs,” she said.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/health/transgender-health-care.html

    If a person has an ovary/uterus, I would think they’d want their doctor to be specific on parts of their body.

    Obudman (18ecb6)

  11. If an elephant can get in my pajamas it can certainly get in my fridge.

    lurker (59504c)

  12. Every time I think we’ve reached Peak Stupidity™…. I’m surprised once again.

    B.A. DuBois (80f588)

  13. “In the examination room, Chong said, doctors and attendants should use gender-neutral terminology and avoid terms like “ovaries” and “uterus.” “You can just say reproductive organs,” she said.”

    Send in the urologists to deliver babies, while we’re at it. I mean, they went to medical school too.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  14. I’m assuming (not an MD) that cancer in the reproductive organs is different if it is ovarian or testicular. But no. Lets keep the location a secret, not to mention the rest of the details.

    steveg (e81d76)

  15. There’s a licensed MD in Texas who believes in incubi and succubi as disease vectors, and hydroxychloroquine as the cure. This is tame stuff.

    nk (1d9030)

  16. “There’s a licensed MD in Texas who believes in incubi and succubi as disease vectors, and hydroxychloroquine as the cure. This is tame stuff.”

    WELL, WHATEVER…CRAZY STUFF…BUT…DIDJA HEAR ABOUT THIS RANDOM CRAZY DUDE WHO NEEDS CANCELING???

    nk always reliable to take attention away from high-profile nationally relevant precedent-setting news concerning long-standing leftist legal organizations that affect everybody with low-profile distractions that affects nobody.

    Depend on the lawyer to be the biggest water carrier, deflector, and social apologist for high profile degenerates trying to get away with past crimes by changing public records and public language. “Well, the money they didn’t spend on taxes, family or useful life projects has to go somewhere, might as well be me!”

    APLU (62e901)

  17. Canadian bacon is ham. I was talking to Obudman at 10 and steveg at 14, about the NYT story, not to some creepy VPN creepazoid about the main post.

    nk (1d9030)

  18. Now, it is quite possible that the “King’s woman” who gave Mr. VPN his herpes (or was it gonorrhea?) was actually a guy dressed up as a woman but it don’ consarn me none, and I don’t think it’s much of a national problem either. Or for Mr. VPN, for that matter, as long as he sticks to dating the widow and her five daughters.

    nk (1d9030)

  19. 17, 18.

    Ah, so nk’s one of those Irony Lefists*.

    *DEFINITION: Irony leftists (ie, bog-standard liberals who engage in the occasional forced homophobia when out of earshot of other liberals) will pretend to be extremely cool and not mad with normal people jokes while they word search your profile to see if you said anything too risqué about protected classes. Ha ha we love being irreverent – but no seriously guys, misogyny is very serious

    Also, they throw around terms like ‘creep’ and ‘freak’ like women to avoid having to engage with inconvenient ideas. Probably because those are the words they hear from women most often.

    Stavros Halkilias (4e31d5)

  20. If everyone, man and women, are telling you you’re a creepy freak maybe the problem is you.

    Time123 (213142)

  21. I worked for a very high level pediatric oncologist who gave me a gift at the end of the project.
    A collection of books by Edgar Cayce. I put one of them under my pillow but all I got was a sore neck

    Steveg (e81d76)


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