In recognition of the one-year anniversary of the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leftist American Civil Liberties Union tweeted a pro-abortion quote from the progressive jurist. The gesture, however, was quickly overshadowed by the organization’s censorship of Ginsburg’s words.
The ACLU posted the tweet in question Saturday.
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity,” read the post. “When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
The correct quote, pulled from Ginsburg’s written responses to lawmakers during her Senate confirmation hearing in 1993, reads: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
To be more inclusive of transgender individuals, the ACLU rewrote the justice’s words, removing any reference to women or female pronouns.
The left-leaning union was met quickly with criticism.
“Did you just censor the word ‘woman’ … and make RBG say something she didn’t?” asked one Twitter user, Silkie Carlo. “I don’t think this advances rights in the way you think it does.”
“Why are you afraid of the word ‘woman?’” added Jordan Chamberlain.
Christian author and pastor Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, argued it’s “bizarre to quote someone seen as a champion of women’s rights and remove the references to, well, women.”
“Stop erasing women,” he added.
Contrarian journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote, “Imagine being so arrogant, patriarchal, and condescending that you think you have the right to take the words of one of the country’s most accomplished women and change what she said after she’s dead to make it cater to what you wish she had said instead of her own words.”
Dave Weigel, a reporter for The Washington Post, responded to the controversy, describing the “pronoun wars” as “bad and silly,” rebuking the ACLU for its “clumsy” censorship of Ginsburg.
“The ACLU removed the word ‘woman’ and put in the word ‘person’ in this quote,” explained leftist commentator Zaid Jilani. “It seems like a bizarre choice to me, and I don’t care how people choose to identity. But why edit history that way?”
The post from the ACLU comes less than two weeks after leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stumbled over her words during an appearance on CNN, in which she adjusted her language to exclude any terms referring only to biological women. Rather, she referred to females as “people who give birth,” “people who are not cisgender men,” and “menstruating persons.”
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