He had a dream
I missed this Spiked article back in June:
The ACLU is broken beyond repair
In March 1984, 14-year-old Karen Slattery was babysitting two children in a Florida home when Duane Owen broke in. He repeatedly raped her and then stabbed her to death. Two months later, Owen broke into the home of Georgianna Worden, before raping the 38-year-old mother and murdering her with a hammer. She was found in her bed the next morning by one of her children.
Last week, after he had spent three decades on death row, the state of Florida executed Owen for his crimes. On the day of the execution, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement on social media decrying Florida’s actions. Did the ACLU condemn the use of the death penalty? No. Did it allege that the killer had not received a fair trial? Also no.
Instead, the ACLU’s main complaint was that the Florida prison service was unwilling to provide Owens with the gender-reassignment treatment he had requested before his execution.
A man who raped and murdered a girl and a woman wanted the state to help him mock women before his execution, and the ACLU considers that a human right and a civil liberty that the state should assist.
The old heroes of the liberal, progressive cause are long gone. And the institutions they created have been hollowed out. In case more evidence of this was needed, last week Planned Parenthood issued a tweet decrying the use of the phrase ‘women’s rights’ when discussing abortion. Apparently, this ‘erases the experiences and identities of queer, nonbinary and trans folks’.
So instead let’s erase the experiences and idenninies of women.
When the ACLU defended the Skokie Nazis it was outrageous but right*. This is outrageous. Therefore it is right. That’s the logic of social media spectacle for you. The irony is that the present-day ACLU would almost certainty have no truck with defending Nazis while desperately clinging to performative chic of radical contrarianism.
*IMO. I’ve wavered a little over the years but when the shit becomes all too real. . .
Where does the list end? Basically every NGO I’ve donated money to in the past has become horrible. I remember the days when folks would talk about how not to respond to provocation from likely FBI plants on the way to protest marches. But nothing FBI infiltration ever achieved has crippled liberal institutions as much as gender ideology.
If you have a minority cause you want supported, a join-and-takeover policy with regard to an existing organisation is a logical though not a very principled way to go. The members of such taken-over organisations are commonly deemed ‘useful idiots’ (an expression usually attributed to the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin) by those wishing to make use of them and/or their said organisations. Sure beats the work you have to do setting up and publicising an organisation of your own, especially when something like the trans cause is a tad short on popular appeal, if not totally on the nose with the overwhelming majority.
The guy spent thirty years on Death Row and the ACLU thinks the cruel and unusual part was that he didn’t get oestrogen or a wig.
(I’m opposed to the death penalty on general principles, but I can’t say I’m particularly sorry that they gave this fucker a lethal injection.)