Without “woman” IT MAKES NO SENSE
This is fucking outrageous.
You see what they did there? They rewrote her words!
The words are from her testimony to the Judiciary Committee when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. They’re her words, not the ACLU’s words, and the fact that she’s talking about women in them is very very central to their meaning and importance and role in history. The ACLU has some fucking gall “correcting” them. I feel like sending them an invoice on behalf of every woman who ever donated to them – pay it all back you fucks.
Also – check it out: the Georgia ACLU managed to quote her own words in April 2019, without feeling entitled to remove the words “women” and “her” and “she” from them.
I wish I could throw a bunch of rotting potatoes at whatever twerp at the ACLU did this. If it’s Chase Strangio I hope he gets fired.
I want my money back, too. It’s just maddening that they kind do this.
Ooh, are we rewriting all historical quotes?
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for [humanity]” — Neil Armstrong
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among [People], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — Declaration of Independence
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural [Person]” — Aretha Franklin
“I never met a [person] I didn’t like” — Will Rogers
As George Carlin would say, this is the kind of thing you’d expect to hear on “Late Night With David Letterperson”
Funnily enough I think those first two would be improved that way, and I sometimes do correct-with-brackets that kind of assumed male remark or quotation. It’s the opposite, you see. The ACLU Twitter person removed women by making it people, while Armstrong and Jefferson never mentioned women at all. Although actually now I think of it, Armstrong said a man – which is the simple truth. Apparently it irritated him a little that it got misquoted as Man.
I watched a Nova from 2018 last night, about Apollo 8, and there’s a nice bit where Michael Collins says he wishes that when he told the astronauts they were ok to leave earth orbit and head for the moon he’d said it poetically instead of in NASA engineering jargon.
Will the ACLU apologize for the violence it inflicted when it quoted RBG correctly in 2019?
Collins said he found the whole countdown to liftoff really stressful and unnecessary. I think his quote was “Why couldn’t they have had a husky voiced blonde say ‘time to go honey’?” Words to that effect anyway.
The ACLU’s bowdlerization of Ginsburg’s statement erases the historical fact that it has been women who have been treated as less than full adult human beings because of their sex, and the ACLU’s misquotation has robbed her statement of its real, true meaning. As such, it’s an insult to Ginsburg’s legacy.
The ACLU reprints the DoI on its site. And does it “correct” Jefferson’s language?
Ha!
I am so glad I only donated to the ACLU once, and that was back in the 80s.
FYI, as someone who makes donations to many groups my name and address has been acquired by the ACLU. I’ve received three mailings from them over the past four months and every time I’ve carefully trimmed off my name and address and written “FIRE CHASE STRANGIO” on the enclosure and then put it in the envelope that says “Postage paid by addressee” and sent it back to them on their nickel. It’s not much of a statement but it’s at least something.
Chase Strangio, the only gender goblin I universally refrain from misgendering. He may have a cervix (no idea) but cut him open and you’d find the phrase “entitled male” through and through.
…
ZOMG! ADVOCATING MURDER! :-o
(Just kidding of course, but can there be any doubt that that’s how it will be framed…)
@3 this is partly why these word games are so insidious. I often put in brackets in quotes I’m quoting to change ‘men’ to ‘people’, when the original quote is assuming only men are people. Changing ‘women’ to people, when the original quote refers specifically to and is specifically about women, has an entirely different effect, and completely changes the meaning of the original quote. I mean, in this case, RBG is saying some people (?) are being treated as less than full human people (?) because some people (?) are controlling the decisions of other people (?)? What does that communicate?
It’s fair to say that the ACLU is not only now an organization that does not support women’s rights, but an organization that works against them. Letting Strangio speak her misogynistic claptrap on company letterhead was bad enough. Officially censoring the words of women is beyond misguided and well along the road to oppressive.
It is wondrous, isn’t it? I feel I am living through some time in history when hardline Christians called every pre- Christian thinker/writer – Aristotle, Virgil say – “a pagan” and discounted them into hell. More liberal Christians would call them “virtuous pagans” and put them in purgatory.
Re poetical language about going to the moon, during the 50th anniversary I watched a lot about the Apollo 11 mission and was fairly moved by the flat, American, military voices guiding this stupendous thing which needed no grand rhetoric around it. Twice the language took a leap from the practical – “the eagle has landed” and “a magnificent desolation”. Re the obviously rehearsed One step – they interviewed Armstrong’s parents, plain mid-Western folk, who said they couldn’t make it out.
Contemptible.
So what would they say if someone changed these words?
to these words:
While I admit that the second does have a ring of truth about it, too (since black people were so often told they weren’t human), it changes the meaning. And I don’t imagine any woke person would accept it.
Iknklast, if a trans black (assigned white at birth) person told us he would be offended otherwise, then that’s what we would have to do, right?
No, because it’s only women who are bullied in this particular way.