Social media team gone wild

Having to agree (mostly) with Reason again:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is very sorry for rewriting a famous quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that it would be gender neutral.

Well, no; unfortunately that’s what they didn’t say. It’s what Romero didn’t say. He said he regrets that it was said, but that’s different from saying he’s “very sorry” – which is apology language as opposed to regret language. I know it’s subtle but the subtle items are exactly the ones we have to be careful about.

“It was a mistake among the digital team,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

That’s what he said. It’s not an apology, not a “very sorry”; it’s an explanation of what happened (what other people did).

Regardless of one’s position on trans issues and the rapidly evolving demands of progressive activists with respect to conscious language choices, it is wrong to go back in time and pretend that people used different words.

Mind you, the social media twerps didn’t pretend that RBG used different words. That would have required leaving off the brackets, which would have made it an outright lie. No, what they did is indicate what she should have said, and would have said if only she had been as enlightened as the twerps who handle social media for the ACLU. What they did is change her wording to something they liked better.

At least the ACLU is admitting that the RBG tweet was a mistake, though the apology Romero offered was a weak one. 

So weak that it wasn’t in fact an apology. He left the apology bit out altogether.

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