The ACLU Misquotes Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Okay, that headline doesn't sound like it describes one of the great scandals of our age. This is a little point, but annoying.

In a recent tweet the ACLU quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the subject of abortion and abortion rights.

Clearly there is a Big Picture afoot here. The long "pro-life" campaign to get Roe v. Wade overturned is nearing its (successful) end.

There is a lot that might be said about that, of course. I am not an admirer of the idea of a "privacy right" because I am not inclined to look for the "emanations and penumbra" of legal documents.

And in fact Ginsburg, if she had had her druthers, wouldn't have founded a woman's right to an abortion on a broad right to "privacy" either. If I recall correctly, she would have invoked the equal protection clause. But once the case came down, with Harry Blackmun's opinion based largely on Griswold and the right to privacy, there was nothing to be done except to work with the materials offered.

But let's leave the Big Picture for another day and hone in on a detail.

The ACLU recently altered a well-known Ginsburg quote in its own effort to defend what remains of Roe.

"The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person's] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices."

They said she said that. Now: the brackets are enough to clue one in that something is going on. But why were the brackets necessary? Were they used to keep the message short and suitable for the twitter age?

No. the actual quote, taken from written responses RBG prepared for the US Senate during her confirmation hearings, was this [and I have italicized what the ACLU bracketed]"

"The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. ... When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices."

I used the ellipsis there just where the ACLU did. But here is the sentence thereby omitted.

It is a decision she must make for herself.

If the ACLU had chosen to include that they would have said that it is a decision [they] must make for [themselves.]

In this instance Ginsburg's actual wording was the consequence of deliberate thought and composition. This wasn't an off-the-cuff remark she made on a street corner. It was contained in a written submission to the Senate. And this is a woman who knew perfectly well the significance of the words she was using -- her judicial career makes that pretty clear.

She should be allowed to use the words she used.

The words she used, as a careful draftsman [can I say that?] had everything to do with the case she would have made, had history put her in Blackman's shoes, that abortion was an equal protection matter. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Offers Critique of Roe v. Wade During Law School Visit | University of Chicago Law School (uchicago.edu)

The words the ACLU substituted for her with its tone deaf brackets?

Well ... there are people in the world who "identify" as men although they have the anatomy traditionally associated with women. Some of them get pregnant, because they have that anatomy, and they engage in sex with men who have the anatomy traditionally associated with men, and this appears not to shatter their identification. They think of it as gay sex because, after all, two men are involved. . So in this sense there are cases of men wanting abortions. [Does that strengthen or weaken or have no impact upon the equal protection argument? Discuss. Use the IRAC format.]

Personally, I'm happy to call someone a "man" if he wants me to, and a "woman" if she wants me to, anatomy notwithstanding.

Whatev dudes and babes.

But: I don't think that the few cases involved in which that sequence of events happens should be enough to force us to tie ourselves into knots and abandon very functional semantic distinctions.

And we certainly shouldn't make that decision on behalf of the deceased and at the expense of the points they were trying to make.

Come off it.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog