IGF CultureWatch

James Kirchick writes:

If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff attorney named Chase Strangio … the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,” Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an ACLU employee to endorse. …

Strangio is of course perfectly entitled to his views about the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school sports, and to advocate for an “information climate” suppressing books he doesn’t like. What’s puzzling is why someone with such pro-censorship inclinations would want to work, of all places, at the American Civil Liberties Union. … Puzzling, that is, until you realize that—like so many other institutions whose worthy missions we naively assumed to be inviolable—the ACLU is no longer itself.

Plus this:

And when other constitutional rights have come into conflict with a First Amendment freedom even more unpopular with progressives than speech—that of religion—the ACLU has made it all but official policy to consider claims of religious conscience as smokescreens for discrimination, arguing that an evangelical Christian baker must make cakes for same-sex weddings against his will (a violation of both expressive and religious freedom), and that Catholic hospitals must perform abortions.

Purposely misleading:

BREAKING: Arkansas has become the first state to ban health care for trans youth.

— ACLU (@ACLU) March 29, 2021

Last 100 @ACLU tweets by topic

Immigration/Muslim ban: 8
Police reform/racial justice: 9
Voting rights: 7
Economic inequality: 3
Prison: 1
Surveillance: 2
Abortion: 3
DC Statehood: 2
ACLU fundraising: 1
Trans issues: 63

Free speech: 1
Due process: 0

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 31, 2021

Say it with us: what you call “gender affirming care” is ruining the lives of thousands of young lesbian, gay and bisexual people. How do we know? Because they tell us – years later, after the hormones, sterilization and mastectomies you call “care”. Shame on you @ACLU https://t.co/wD7OAZxhka

— LGB Alliance (@ALLIANCELGB) April 5, 2021

ACLU sues to block woman’s request for data on transgender inmates in women’s prisons. https://t.co/jO64FxZoQa

— CultureWatch (@IndeGayForum) April 14, 2021

The downward spirals goes on and on … and on

It confuses me so much that major organizations like the ACLU make no effort to rein in their most famous, Online staffers. To accuse Michelle Goldberg — Michelle Goldberg! — of peddling "white supremacy" makes the organization look like an utter laughingstock. https://t.co/WrOY2QkYEt

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) April 19, 2021