It’s a sad day when the American Civil Liberties Union has to alter a quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (one of our mutual heroes) to placate the potentially offended. Here’s one of their recent tweets:
With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, we lost a champion for abortion and gender equality. And on the anniversary of her death, the fight to protect abortion access is more urgent than ever. pic.twitter.com/vIKadIHouN
— ACLU (@ACLU) September 18, 2021
Here’s the original quote from Ginsburg:
“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 the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg
There are six changes, five in brackets, getting rid of “woman” and “her” (substituting “persons” and “people” for “woman” and “they” or “their” for three “hers”). The missing part of the quote, which is “It is a decision she must make for herself”, could have been altered to “It is a decision they must make for themselves,” but that would add two more sets of brackets and make the whole quotation look really weird.
The explanation is simple and obvious; they are removing RBG’s reference to women having babies since the ACLU, whose mission now includes a substantial amount of transgender activism, is onboard with the idea that transmen, who are now given the pronouns “he” and “men”, can have babies. And indeed, transmen have given birth.
I have no quarrel with asserting that transsexual men can have offspring while using male pronouns. What bothers me is the alteration of RBG’s quotation, which strikes me as disingenuous, as it alters what somebody actually said with the purpose of conforming to an ideology that didn’t exist during most of RBG’s life. Would it cause harm if people were to read the actual quote? Would the quote really be considered transphobic given that RBG was not a transphobe?
I doubt it; we know that usage has changed in the past decade. And if we can go ahead and alter quotes any way we want so they are seen as less offensive and less “harmful”, well, we’re in trouble.
As I’ve said for a while, the ACLU is circling the drain. If they were offended by the original quote, they should have either used it as it was spoken, or not used it at all.
To be fair, I’ll link you to a defense of this kind of usage (which to me still doesn’t justify altering RBG’s quote), in this article by Emma Green in the Atlantic.
Awaiting Ophelia Benson’s reaction to this…
You can only imagine the cognitive dissonance and scratching of heads at the ACLU? They must be thinking, do we raise an ethical issue by mangling somebody’s quote, or do we just mangle someone’s quote to avoid backlash by TRAs.
From Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped.”
What does our host think of Ophelia Benson’s blog?
Jerry is a lot more generous than me…. 🙂
DO tell.
Ophelia sticks to the truth as she sees it. Where do you find fault?
Ophelia was fully on board the FreeThoughtBlogs bandwagon until they “turfed” her out in 2015. For 4 years, she was spewing regressive nonsense about how bad and evil the likes of Dawkins and Harris were, while chumming up with and enabling PZ M*ers and the other crazies who eventually turned on her.
Just because Ofie is OK when it comes to pointing out the illogical stance of the TRAs, she lost her own skepticism and credibility around Elevatorgate (2011-ish). She was very much part of the “skeptic” crowd that pushed aside facts and evidence (i.e. skepticism), and instead, ushered in the era of “feelings” and “lived experience” trumping skepticism.
Though it seems that, thanks to trans activists, Ophelia and many other feminists have rediscovered the merits of a grounding in biological reality.
Ophelia Benson has criticized some of the well-known atheist spokesmen, but has always been firmly ideologically grounded in reality. I first began following her about 20 years ago when her focus was on endorsing rational philosophy and calling out both sloppy versions of postmodernism and forms of feminism grounded in “feelings” and “lived experience” instead of science and reason. She’s still at it, with this new variation.
You may rightly believe that at one time or other she ignored some facts and evidence for something or other, but as far as I know she’s never denied the significance of having facts and evidence per se.
But there Freethought blogs era is past history. The question was what is her blog like (with an implicit now). It’s entirely possible she has regained some perspective (I don’t read her blog, except when it concerns Freethought blogs, so I can’t comment either way).
Since Elevatorgate was so long ago, I don’t recall enough details to argue with you about that factor. Still, there were battle lines drawn over who were acting rationally and who were overreacting. In that case I will defer to the fact that people, even skeptics, are swayed in their analysis of events by their perspective. Skeptics are subject to human weaknesses, including lack of criticality, when they have to examine their won viewpoint.
I’ve been reading her blog for a very long time, previous to Atheism +, Elevatorgate, Gamergate, and the various issues that have caused rifts in Sketicana and can’t think of a time when OB chose feelings over facts. Which is not to say she hasn’t expressed anger or happiness over events.
Now it’s mostly about trans issues and occasional climate stuff, all OK. The occasional social-justice-warrior post sounds more like PZ, though.
I haven’t read it for a long time.
It is indeed a sad day for our country when the ACLU engages in exactly those actions it purports to defend!
“If they were offended by the original quote, they should have either used it as it was spoken, or not used it at all.”
Abso-bloody-lutely. What a pretentious, mealy mouthed, self-righteous action. To quote someone because you approve of their message but not respect the intelligence of your audience to filter out whatever they find anachronistic.
There is no excuse for altering a quotation!
No
re Sarah, above: “There is no excuse for altering a quotation!”
It might be a generational thing. A few years ago I wrote an article on Taiwan where there was a small error. A very woke GenZer (Harvard alum, no less, go figure) involved suggested I just “take it down” – I had to explain to her the rest of the (journalistic) world isn’t like Facebook.
I offered to (and my editor did) run a correction but her lived experience tied her all in knots, or something. The error stayed. I’d have quit if my editor had “taken it down”. Hate that.
That is a classic Orwell quote above about history has stopped. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Yes, if it’s a misprint, a typo, you can silently correct it, but otherwise, if you think it is mistaken or unclear, you explain it in square brackets or a footnote or you write “sic” after whatever it is. You absolutely do not muck around with somebody else’s words! These people need some basic lessons in scholarship and editing if they are pretending to be professionals.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight. Those of us who are pro-choice ask the pro-life camp to just suck it up, despite the fact that many of them sincerely believe that actual murder is taking place. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to do it. If it offends their deepest convictions in life, well, go piss up a rope. Yet *some* of us simply CANNOT tolerate the offense created by disagreement about pronoun usage? And we wonder why it’s so darn easy for people to just snicker when we get righteously angry about their successful use of power politics?
They may ‘sincerely believe’, but that does not make it correct.. They are wrong, and shown to be wrong many times over .
One may ‘sincerely believe’ that MMR vaccines cause autism, but one would still be wrong.
Facts should trump ‘sincere beliefs’.
“Facts should trump ‘sincere beliefs’.”
Indeed they should. A pity they are in such short supply amongst the Offense Brigade. The fact that men don’t have babies should trump a woman’s sincere belief that she is a man. If you think the “facts” of trans activists are more grounded in reality than the beliefs of anti-choice activists, I think you are seriously mistaken.
The sincerely held beliefs of a pregnant man about their identity are precisely as evidence based as claims to being washed in the Blood of the Lamb.
I never get the pregnant man thing. And I’m not crazy about being schooled in it for some reason….
Damnit – I’m only 50 and I’m “passed it”. Happy I’ll probably never be pregnant myself – all going well – and I’ve nothing against anybody else reproducing. Have at it!
But “passed it.” (sigh)
D.A.
NYC
Ken Phelps
This is so good! You really nailed it! I would love to quote you! May I?
I’m not washed in the blood of the lamb….that always kind of freaked me out .
But the contention that men can have babies is so ridiculous as to be something in Alice in Wonderland , or more sinisterly in Orwell.
The question of whether abortion is murder is not a simple question of fact. Legally speaking, it’s not currently defined as murder, but the word “murder” is often used more broadly than the strict legal sense. An “innocent” human life is ended, usually to avoid inconvenience. For some, that’s enough to make it murder. It’s also an apparently unconscious and non-sentient human life, at least in early- to mid-term abortions. For some, that’s enough to make it not murder.
Most of the facts aren’t in dispute. Whether or not it’s considered murder depends more on a person’s ethics than they do on the facts. (I think the main exception is when people base their opposition on a belief in a soul.)
Sure, it’s entirely possible to have discussions, and even disagreements, about abortion among reasonable people.
But it is those committed to the irrational religious belief in the ensoulment of zygotes who make all the trouble by blowing up abortion clinics, by shooting abortion doctors, by harassing women entering abortion clinics on the street, by opening bogus “crisis pregnancy” centers meant to fool women, and by passing laws making abortion a crime.
Germinal and embryonic tissue is not a human being. Therefore removing that tissue cannot be murder. Pretending not to understand this is just dishonest. There are no questions of ethics involved.
At what point does it become a human being? Should be an easy question for you.
Three points. First, the irony when they speak of the gyn(ecologist). Second, the facts that men (in the traditional sense of the term) can get breast cancer and that that is not widely known have nothing to do with the debate at hand. Third, be redefining “man” and “woman” to be associated with typical male or female behaviour, rather than biology, is a return to the gender stereotypes of the 1950s and before, as exemplified by Woody Allen’s (he comes across as more or less a classical liberal otherwise) famous goof in a 60 Minutes interview when talking about his unborn child “Well, I like baseball if it’s a boy; I like ballet if it’s a girl”. I thought that at least self-identifying progressives had left such reactionary ideas long behind.
The whole point of being trans is to be treated differently by society than before the transition. But we have spent decades learning and teaching not to treat people differently because of their sex/gender/race/etc. It seems a step, or several steps or even a marathon, backwards. I saw it as progress when men could wear long hair and women wear trousers. Even with regard to things I don’t personally like, such as make-up, pipe-smoking, high heels, and so on, why should preference for something which is traditionally associated with the other sex mean that one has to “identify” as that sex? Why not just do it? The only people who should care about one’s sex are those one has a sexual relationship with, but most people, whether gay or straight, are probably interested in real, biological, men and/or women, so even there it doesn’t cut it. (A surprising number of people think that male-to-female transgender people can become pregnant.)
These days, someone whose transition is nothing more than bad eyeliner can say that he is a lesbian and if lesbians don’t want a sexual relationship with him then they are transphobe. And people take that seriously (perhaps because there are many online threats of physical violence FROM the trans community against “transphobia”, probably more than vice versa).
I fully expect to receive death threats and be cancelled in various venues as a result of this comment.
As a male, I don’t receive any threats so you’ll probably be okay, too. Those are reserved for women.
And “gender identity” does not help break the so-called gender binary. It enforces the stereotypest that one set of personal characteristics is necessarily male or female. It’s a regressive idea, which is one reason that gender critical feminists oppose it. As you say, if they truly wished to make a difference they would hark back to the New Romantics and even earlier to David Bowie, the New York Dolls, and T-Rex. They did what they did for androgyny’s sake and never claimed the opposite sex.
Last I heard, transmen who campaigned to have their “assigned at birth” sex eradicated from their driving licences, passports, and other public documents were complaining that the NHS hadn’t called them up for cervical cancer screening… “Trans man says confusion caused cervical screening delay” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-58515769
I fully appreciate that the doctor in that case wrote to the screening service, but if you decide to keep a cervix but identity as a man and show up with a beard, things can fairly predictably go wrong….!
And the “Carry On” movies, and Benny Hill, will never be re-booted. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
ps Actually seeing the end of Benny Hill is a good thing.
Tried that link, it no longer points to an article.
When you start altering someone’s words in a quote you have apparently hit bottom.
I’m a foreign language educator and translator. I have to disagree with one point. There are times when it is absolutely appropriate to change a quotation: when translating it. I don’t mind that we have quotations from Voltaire and Goethe translated into English. The conundrum occurs when we ask what source materials are distant enough from their audience to be worthy of a translation. We don’t mind translating Chaucer from Middle English to Modern English. How about Shakespeare from Early Modern English to Contemporary Modern English? That is still up for debate, but I see more people wanting modern translations of the Bard. How about translations across contemporary dialects? I’ve seen people insist that the American ‘translation’ of Harry Potter is just wrong, and insist on only reading the British original. I don’t know how many Americans prefer the translation. At this point, I feel that it is too soon to change Ginsburg’s words, but recognize that there will be a point where they will have to be changed to remain accessible to distant populations (in time or space) or they will be lost.
Very well put.
Good points, but not relevant to this situation.
Agreed. This is happening now, not in the future, and I doubt that her words will be unintelligible over the next few centuries!
This is a difference between modernizing a text and rewriting it. You may translate Shakespeare into a Yorkshire dialect or slang, but Shakespeare’s original words remain the same and can be found intact. I gather that the ACLU is trying to obliterate the original wording of RBG to be replaced with this clunky, fashionable verbiage, and that is simply Orwellian.
The only appropriate time to change Shakespeare is if you’re back-translating it into the original Klingon.
Several years ago, there was an attempt to create a non-sexist version of the Bible, replacing “father” with “father/mother,” for example: “Our Father/Mother, who is in Heaven . . .” If Jesus used the male noun, this is not translating the Bible, it is distorting it. Some parts of the Bible ARE sexist (and racist, and homophobic, and anti-Semitic, and so on) and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. To change someone’s words in this way is not a translation, it is a misquotation, and opens the door for other people to put words into people’s mouths. Why not put a pro-choice message into the Gettysburg Address? (“Well, Lincoln SHOULD have said it!”)
Also, I wondered why they didn’t use the existing non-sexist term “parent” instead of “father/mother.”
A translated quote is labelled as such.
An old quote modified for the benefit of a much later audience is identified as such.
A claimed quote which is deliberately modified from the actual quote is simply false, and so is a goddam lie, and the people putting it out are liars, not to be trusted ever again by anyone interested in the truth.
I don’t think there is anything the least bit difficult nor subtle there. And I’m not the least bit interested in ‘you’, nor your opinions, if ‘you’ are not ready to be truthful—except to expose ‘you’ as a liar—too bad the press and TV news fail badly in many cases like this.
I strongly disagree: altering a contemporary quote equates to lying. RBG was not using old or middle English. Deflection, to put it mildly.
Based on the replies to the tweet, it looks like the edits only managed to distract people from the intended main point of the quote.
Unless the main point of the edits was to distract people from the quote and draw their focus to the other pressing issue.
From a journalistic ethics point of view, it’s flat wrong to alter a quote, regardless of motive. One can paraphrase someone so long as one states that it is such, but doing so is fraught with the peril of appearing to alter the original writer’s intent.
This hurts the ACLU’s credibility.
Agreed absolutely.
I think it’s entirely ethical (and standard practice) for journalists (or other writers) to alter a quote with ellipses or the insertion of bracketed material — so long as it’s done solely for the purpose of clarity or concision and does not alter the quote’s meaning or otherwise cast it in a misleading light.
An ellipse signals that a section of the quote has been omitted. Brackets can be used to clarify something. That is quite different from changing the words themselves.
It is commonplace in legal writing when quoting from a case to use brackets to employ gender-neutral terms (such as “the suspect” or “the arrestee” or “the defendant” or “the offender”) to replace “he” or “she,” or “him” or “her,” where the legal principle at issue in the quoted passage does not depend upon an individual’s sex.
In this instance, however, the use of the bracketed material strikes me as both awkward and inappropriate.
A local rag here’s police reports, quite alright, tries desperately to avoid identifying those accused of huge international crime such as driving badly, or 20kph over the speed limit, partly by avoiding even the sex, by use of “they”, “them”, etc. But then often in the next sentence it was “he” or “she” was transported to hospital for minor injury from flipping over ….
Hard to know whether the writer and any editor was sober or what?
No, just human. Pronouns are a “closed category” psychologically, unlike the nouns of the “euphemism treadmill” (Pinker)
D.A.
NYC
It would be similarly irritating if they inserted [sic] into the quote several times, although I ‘spose it would be less wrong.
The Atlantic article makes a pretty good case for institutionalizing change in our pronoun usage. That is how this effort will gain ground, mind you, by getting organizations to change their language. It is still very hard to imagine how these efforts, however well intended, will ever make real headway in common usage.
Today’s sensibilities regarding gender are irrelevant here. Justice Ginsburg is being misquoted, plain and simple. An author’s actual words are sacrosanct and should never be changed. One can only imagine the damage that could be done if we decided to alter other texts after the fact. Think about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or Washington’s Farewell Address, or Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. This is a slippery slope that has no end, should we decide to step upon it. We can avoid this calamity simply by accepting the reality that a person’s words are unalterable. Those were the words that were said, and they cannot be undone.
“Sacrosanct”? Apropos of the comment by the anonymous translator above, which would you rather read, this;
or this;
FTR I think the ACLU edits are ridiculous, cringe worthy, performative and effectively derails the point.
Still, an author’s words should not be considered “sacrosanct”. IMO, of course.
I much prefer the original, which is how we read it in my first year English Literature course in University in 1943.
Yes. As do I. As did we in university in 1967.
I read it as a teenager in translation and then (re)read it in the original a few years ago when I taught a course on the history of English. I much prefer the original.
This strikes me as Ministry of Truth. Where’s the dividing line between this, and altering someone’s quote (or publication) to change the meaning to something more politically correct. Next thing you know, Strom Thurmond will support integration.
The changes already slightly change the meaning. In Ginsburg’s original, “woman” had connotations that are completely missing in “person” (centuries of women scared of being left single and pregnant, of shame, of family or male pressure, of being seen as feeble minded because female…).
It may not be possible to hold those two positions at once, since referring to women-who-identify-as-men as “he” is also disingenuous, a polite fiction used for courtesy which rapidly morphs into a fact supported by science and enforced by law. The language we use can be used to reframe situations. Abortion is no longer a woman’s issue; it’s a people’s issue. We’ve included women who rejected being women. What now follows from that?
The problem isn’t that women aren’t people, of course. It’s that women are a particular category of people with common concerns based on sex. Gender Identity Advocates are going to have to wipe out Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s feminist legacy because she fought for women’s sex-based rights. She recognized the role that women’s reproduction, sexuality, and weaker physical stature had in a discrimination grounded in cultural stereotypes concerning “femininity.” Those cultural stereotypes are defined by the word “gender.”
GI advocates want to replace “sex” with “gender” in law. They do not have a clear definition of what they mean by “gender.” They do not have a clear definition of what they mean by “woman.” RBG wouldn’t have let that pass.
I normally get annoyed by the constant references these days to Orwell’s 1984 (from both the left and the right). But I gotta say… this is an example that could’ve been pulled right from the book itself.
And what’s more scary is that the ACLU’s goal is likely to normalize this type of ‘re-writing history’ simply by doing it more and more often without any sort of fine print or explanation. If this truly becomes normalized, then we’re on a very dangerous path to a very dangerous future in which it will be almost impossible to learn from and interpret history.
The ACLU has historically been trusted by a wide swath of Americans as a ‘good’ institution that is looking out for the common citizen. I see this as a gross abuse of their gained trust, and feel they’re using decades worth of earned trust to manipulate thought and behavior.
I may be looking way too far ahead here or catastrophizing, but I really don’t like this.
One of the major founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, is in need of immediate revision to remove the stink of sexism that runs through it. The word “he” appears 19 times; the word “mankind” appears 3 times; and the word “men” twice. I urge the ACLU to fix this terrible problem now. Really, can there by anything more important?
Fixing the sexist language in the Declaration of Independence is not important because there’s nothing currently at stake which doing so will “fix” by drawing such attention.
Changing the word “women” to “people” when discussing the legal aspects of the “people’s” issue of abortion, however, wouldn’t really be like changing “mankind” to “humankind” in an historic legal document. Transgender ideology is a hot button issue with the facts still under legitimate dispute. I therefore think it’s more like changing the word “fetus” to “baby.”
People are hoping to settle an argument by fiat. A semantic coup, if you will.
Sastra, I think Historian was being sarcastic.
Oh, suuuuure he is.
Will future generations want to tear down statutes or paintings of RGB because of RGB’s use of gendered pronouns? The monster!
RBG, oops!
I find this incredibly distressing. Changing a quote by RBG to bring it up to woke-speed is very alarming coming from the ACLU.
Whenever I see such heavily altered quotes, I think of constable Pan-Am reading from his notebook for court testimony in a Monty Python sketch: “He said: ‘It’s a fair … cop, I done it all … Right… no doubt about… that’. Then, bound as he was to the chair, he assaulted myself and three other constables while bouncing around the cell. The end.”
On the crucial issue of translation (commenter #7), let us rejoice in the arrival of a new specialty: translating between Progressivese and English. I daresay, the awkwardness of bracketed changes, “they” as a singular, and novel pronouns are only the beginning. New words will soon appear to replace forbidden, gendered words like “mother”, “father”, “daughter”, “son”, and so on. Capital letters, with their implication of patriarchy, will be abandoned. Words with the syllable “man” will be spelled “mxn”, as in womxn, humxn, mxngo, and the British dialect known as Mxnx. The catchy x in “Latinx” will no doubt spread to use for other communities, such as the Russianx, the Islamx, the First Nationsx, and of course the Transx. Those able to translate this kind of discourse into English will have their work cut out for them, and will become as ubiquitous as Diversity Consultantsx.
Droll. But Manx speakers might take offense in a whole new direction at Manx being called a “British dialect”.
Off-topic, but there’s some Manx language (and a brief glossary) in Matthew Kneale’s 2000 Whitbread Book Award-winning historical novel English Passengers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Passengers
Also a doctor with a nasty interest in eugenics… I haven’t re-read it since it came out, but I remember it being a pretty decent book.
Well, maybe not if “British” is taken to mean the language of the historic Britons, i.e., something
related to Gaelic.
Gura mie eu.
Hmm, I don’t think so. In any case, Manx is not a dialect of anything, but a language on the Gaelic and Irish branch of Celtic languages (Q Celtic).. Britons were a people and perhaps spoke an archaic Old Welsh, but probably not “British”.
McWhorter’s current opinion piece in the NYT is about pronoun gender fluidity, too (albeit not as regards pregnant people).
*[P]regnant people”? Impregnated cervix-owners surely! Or was that last week…
Re: the use of the “singular they”:
From a segment of the 9/20/21 NPR “Morning Edition” regarding the new Texas abortion law:
(www.npr.org/2021/09/20/1038854766/the-impact-of-the-strict-new-abortion-law-in-texas)
“WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: Last month, 23-year-old K.T., who lives in the San Antonio area, discovered they’d accidentally gotten pregnant. NPR is not using K.T.’s full name to protect medical and legal privacy. A single nurse with a full-time job who’s also still in school, K.T. was not ready to have a child.”
Re: “they’d”: a reader/listener has no evidence that the nurse in question perceives herself (themself? themselves?) as “they.” NPR did not say that K.T. identified as a “they,” whether singular or plural. For all the listener can possibly know from this report, the nurse, if pressed to say, perhaps just as if not more likely employs the pronouns “she” and “her.” (K.T. sure sounded like a cis-she to my ears.)
Consider, ” . . . K.T. was not ready to have a child.” Can “they was not ready” be reasonably substituted? Is NPR trying to cover its pronoun hindquarters? If the nurse said that she was specifically a “she” and a “her,” would NPR be reasonably obliged to report that “SHE was not ready to have a child”? Or that SHE was not ready to be a MOTHER? (And if she stated – nay, insisted – that the father was a cis-MAN – she presumably knowing a male member when she saw one – would NPR be no less reasonably obligated to report that aspect of the situation?)
To be fair, the use of “singular they” goes back a very long way:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
I used to avoid the singular “they” even where the gender of the antecedent was unknown (or did not matter). But I tired of writing the clumsy “he or she.” Then I discovered that Jane Austen used the singular “they” in such circumstances, and damned if that ain’t good enough for me.
“I have no quarrel with asserting that transsexual men can have offspring while using male pronouns.”
I do, actually. Words have meanings. Even if we grant that a biological female who wants to present as a man and live as a man should be addressed as a man, that person forfeits any right to become offended at being called a woman the moment they become pregnant. Like, if you want to be called a vegetarian, don’t eat steaks. If you want to be called a teetotaller, don’t get drunk. If you want to be called a man, don’t get pregnant.
Indeed! “Trans man who gave birth cannot register as baby’s father” https://metro.co.uk/2019/09/25/trans-man-gave-birth-cannot-register-babys-father-10806722/
Some words have specific meanings, regardless of what some people insist:
Pox on the ACLU for changing RBG’s quote!!! There is no excuse for doing that, especially since she’s only been gone just over a year…
One note on translations: Shakespeare’s works weren’t translated into German until about 1840. They were translated into the language of the time, which has understandably undergone many fewer changes in the intervening two centuries than English has in four centuries. Thus, the texts are far easier for Germans to read/understand in German than Shakespeare’s English is for modern English readers, especially Americans. German students reading Shakespeare in their own language often do not understand why Americans students have such difficulty reading his works.
I contemplate whether the ACLU would have had the gall to change RBG’s quote while she was alive.
Unless they encounter Shakespeare in their English classes, as I did. But then again, Shakespearean English is slightly more “German” than modern English (“hast thou” comes naturally to a German student who says “hast du” 5 times a day).
Hello, ACLU? Don’t put quotes around it if it isn’t — you know — a QUOTE (FFS).
It’s sad that they would give this false impression, they could’ve at least mentioned that they edited the quote.
At my job in Amazon, they now use “Latinx” and “historically oppressed people” when referring to Latinos in articles about whatever social justice thing the company is doing. The wording in these articles give the false impression that the majority of Latinos are part of the social justice movement and in the victimization business. 96% of Latinos want to go by Latino, polls show that a overwhelmingly majority of Latinos are not politically correct.
Almost all US Latino Amazon workers (and blacks) work at it’s warehouses or low skilled jobs. Amazon warehouse workers have a turnover rate of 150% a year because of low pay and bad work conditions.
Yet, there answer is diversity training and hiring racial quotas (Amazon is worth $1.7 trillion).
What’s the point of diversity if they’re all going to quit?
What Amazon is doing is the same as going to a 3rd world country and handing out bibles.
Please remember that we now refer to the Amazon community as Amazonx.
In classical music this would be the equivalent of changing the tempo. Try doing that to a Beethoven piece, you’d never hear the end of it…
it would not be true to the composer’s intentions and indeed in Beethoven’s case (I muse) HE would roll over and most definitely curse the conductor.
“Don’t go messing with my tempo!”
Likewise, the true target of RGB’s quote has been ‘aborted,’ write your own if you feel inclusive. I accept anything you want to be, a person of equal rights nothing less but abortion rights for a trans female is redundant and need not be expressed, trans male could or would be an exception and your right is protected.
Women’s rights have taken eons to surface and gain momentum and altering this quote to suit yourself on a very substantial issue is submissive of the cause.
And tell Tchaikovsky the news? 🙂
ACLU is not what it used to be. As Jerry documented earlier, they are now committed to censorship and book-banning:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/11/14/aclu-staff-attorney-calls-for-censorship-of-abigail-shriers-book-on-gender-dysphoria/
I’ll stick out my neck: honestly, I’ve had it with transgenderism.
Although I do believe such a thing may exist, l can’t believe fhe recent epidemic of female to male transgenderism is actually that. (see Shrier)
And I have a long suspicion that male to femsle transgenderism is -for a large part- a strategy of ‘omega males’ to get access to females . I see very little feminine traits and behaviour in these ‘females’.
While being so engrossed and engaged in embracing the female penis I forgot all about the male vagina. I now do strenuously and emphatically denounce myself. Long live whatever is politically correct for the moment, for the moment is all I live within !!!!
Feminism is the radical notion that [persons] are people.
This has the smell of a civilisation in terminal decline.
Book banning, 1984-style editing of the past. Third strike and I will stop donating to ACLU.