It’s annoying having to agree with the Federalist and disagree with the ACLU but it happens, especially when the ACLU has been hypnotized by the gender fanatics.

The American Civil Liberties Union erased women this week when it tweeted an altered quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, removing the words “women,” “her,” and “she” from the quotation. 

…

This incident is one more example of the left’s overarching campaign to erase women by undermining and distorting our understanding of gender as a scientifically legitimate category of classification.

This is where it gets annoying. Since when has the left campaigned to erase women??? The left got a massive wake-up slap on that subject more than 50 years ago, and since then it’s been the right campaigning to maintain the gender status quo and the left campaigning to bring women out of the kitchen…until the last few years.

The altered quote follows leftists like Rep. Cori Bush using the phrase “birthing persons,” and the pro-abortion organization NARAL defending her use of the term, saying that “it’s not just cis-gender women can get pregnant and give birth.” The Biden administration even erased women when it replaced “mothers” with “birthing people” in maternal health guidance.

Also irritating to agree with National Review:

Ginsburg’s oft-stated view was that the legal right to abortion was necessary in order to give women equality with men, because men did not have to fear unwanted pregnancies. To remove the references to sex is to destroy this argument and to substitute in a completely new one.

Because men didn’t have to fear unwanted pregnancies or go through them or have their lives disrupted by them. Men didn’t have to give birth to babies they never wanted to conceive. Men could plan their lives with a sense of confidence and freedom that wasn’t fully available to women.

Most of those who have criticized the ACLU for this behavior have noted that, once again, the organization has caved to the terminally woke. And, indeed, it has. But there is another point that needs making, and that is that what the ACLU has done here represents a flat-out repudiation of the core value for which the ACLU is supposed to stand: anti-censorship.

Altering people’s speech so that it fits in with contemporary societal norms is censorship. Yes, it’s also pathetic and revisionist and Stalinist and manipulative and, sadly, wholly indicative of where the Left seems ineluctably to be headed these days. And no, it’s not the same — or as bad — as when the government does it. But it’s censorship nevertheless. For whatever reason, the ACLU is scared of offending people who believe that it is bigoted to imply that only woman can have babies. And so, in an attempt to head off their criticism, it has altered a famous quote from a famous woman who implied that only women can have babies. In doing this, it has censored her.

She didn’t so much imply it as take it for granted, as she took for granted that everyone knows what a woman is, and what laws are, and what pregnancy is, and what unwanted pregnancy is, and similar basics. There’s no need to imply what everyone already knows. (Sometimes what everyone already knows is wrong…but other times it isn’t.)

In 1861, Alexander Stephens said of the Confederacy: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Mercifully, this idea does not fit well with our modern sensibilities (or, for that matter, with the Declaration’s). Should the United Daughters of the Confederacy follow the ACLU’s lead and respond to this by redacting the parts of the sentence that give it its core meaning? Should they attempt to limit the discomfort of their members by amending the quote so that it reads:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that [some people] [are] not equal to [other people].

And if not, why not? The claim that they’re different because one is being done “for bad” and one is being done “for good” is just special pleading. Indeed, it is worse than special pleading: It is the acceptance of the Soviet-esque idea that it is acceptable to rewrite history if it helps the cause of progress. Everyone in America should reject this. But the ACLU? They should be setting their hair alight.

Instead, they’re setting ours alight.