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“The lawsuit involved here, were it to succeed, would strike at the heart of freedom of speech,” the American Civil Liberties Union website still says today, 23 years later.
“The case is based on a shocking murder,” they admit. “But the lawsuit says the crime is the responsibility not of those who committed the murder, but of someone who posted vile material on the Internet.”
Once upon a time the ACLU had principles: “The principle is as simple as it is central to true freedom of speech: those who do wrong are responsible for what they do; those who speak about it are not.”
Get that? According to the ACLU, Americans are free to use she/her pronouns for Chase Strangio without being accused of ‘harm.’ Because words are not harm. So all of you good readers who have been banned, censored, canceled, shunned, unemployed, or otherwise harmed personally or professionally for thoughtcrimes about Pride or gender: you stand hereby absolved of sin.
Whenevermore you are accused of ‘transphobic harm’ henceforth, cite the precedent of Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) and tell them that the American Civil Liberties Union says they are wrong.
What makes that particular case so odious 23 years later is that the ACLU intervened by choice, and to make a side point. Using the twisted logic of legal precedents, they were trying to tease apart homosexuality from pedophilia.
At issue back then was whether NAMBLA, the odious North American Man-Boy Love Association, could be held liable for the actions of a member who was involved in a gruesome child murder.
Pedophilia apologetics aside, NAMBLA had not advised or encouraged Charlie Jaynes to take part in the murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, the ACLU argued. Jaynes had viewed the organizational website hours before the murder, but none of the material on their website encouraged or excused kidnapping and murdering children.
Jaynes and another man, Salvatore Sicari, were convicted of the crime. The parents of the victim sued NAMBLA alleging they bore responsibility. The ACLU of Massachusetts got the lawsuit dismissed on the basis of the aforementioned Supreme Court precedent.
Decided in 1969, Brandenburg v. Ohio is the constitutional standard for whether government can punish inflammatory speech. In order to hold someone liable for harm caused by speech, the speech must be shown to incite real, imminent harm.
In other words, calling Lia Thomas a man is not harmful. Using his pronouns is not harmful. Telling someone to boo Lia Thomas is not harmful. Booing him is not harmful. Only telling someone who wants to harm Lia Thomas to go ahead and harm Lia Thomas is ever possibly harmful to Lia Thomas.
It’s a pretty good standard, as speech standards go. But in other news, the ACLU cites WPATH as the eminent and reliable medical authority on ‘trans kids’ when they tell federal judges to strike down state laws against the child-sterilizing trans cult.
Through their association with a group of men worse than NAMBLA, WPATH has absolutely met the test that the ACLU presented back then for whether an organization is responsible for encouraging harm.
“The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community,” reads the Eunuch Archive. Get that? It’s a “community.”
Or “a fetish forum that hosts and produces fictional child pornography and extreme sadomasochistic content,” in the words of Genevieve Gluck.
Reporting for Reduxx in May 2022, Gluck explained that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) collaborated with the fetish forum in creating a new “eunuch identity” for their latest Standards of Care.
It also goes on to claim that “eunuch-identified people may suffer the same minority stress as other stigmatized groups,” and refers extensively to research collected from a hardcore fetish site called the Eunuch Archives — a site that features child sexual exploitation fantasies centered around stopping little boys from going through puberty.
Genital mutilation fetishists have archived many thousands of fiction stories “primarily focus on the eroticization of child castration.” Rape, torture, and murder feature throughout the content. Some of the men want to be de-sexed, others to castrate other men. Mainly, the fantasies revolve around control and exploitation of children.
In some, little boys request the procedures themselves and express gratitude to the adults who perform the operations. In others, children may be forcibly castrated under extreme duress. Some narratives contain violent sexualized depictions of children with stunted puberty being raped by doctors, written in sickening detail.
Gluck notes that a longtime forum administrator who calls himself ‘Jesus’ consistently claims to network with the American Psychiatric Associaiton and WPATH in formulating standards of care.
In 2016, ‘Jesus’ claimed to have been specifically chosen to rewrite a portion of the Standards of Care by former WPATH president Eli Coleman, who “pointed at me and announced that I was expected to provide input on eunuchs for the revision. Now is our opportunity to help devise the standards of care that will be most helpful,” wrote Jesus.
In 2018, ‘Jesus’ announced the upcoming revisions to the guidelines and invited collaboration from members of the community.
In response to WPATH’s newly-released draft Standards of Care in December last year, one site member professed to being “absolutely delighted,” and said he would “gladly throw millions under the bus” in order to secure “a future where doctors must obey and have no right to demand reasons or withhold surgery and medication.”
Further investigation revealed that ‘Jesus’ is a Professor Emeritus at California State University named Thomas. Johnson. “His academic interests advocate for expanding the concept of ‘gender identity’ to include men with sadomasochistic and even pedophilic castration fantasies — something that has now been included as a Male-to-Eunuch identity in the draft Standards of Care for the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).”
“In addition to Johnson, the identities of two other leading site members have also been determined by Reduxx as similarly prominent academics.”
Wassersug, Willette, and Johnson were again invited to speak at a 2011 WPATH conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It was during this conference that the decision was made to de-classify Gender Identity Disorder as a psychological condition. In its place, Gender Dysphoria would become the recommended terminology.
Johnson claims to have been influential in editing the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The DSM is regarded as the authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders in the United States, but is also referenced internationally.
To recap: high-level academics with bizarre and disturbing fantasies have successfully lobbied key medical and psychiatric industry associations for decades in order to normalize and bureaucratize their fetish for mutilated children. The ACLU is laundering violent pedophilia for its own reasons again.
Any day now, we can expect the ACLU to defend the “eunuch identity” of a minor child in defense of medical malpractice.
The ACLU refuses to uphold the rights of any woman over any ‘trans woman’ for any purpose at all: sports, prisons, or spaces. It is an institutionally sexist organization under current leadership.
The ACLU has become quite wealthy in recent years through the generous donations of billionaires promoting ‘trans issues.’ It has made them institutionally homophobic.
They host homophobic gay conversion therapy discussions on their podcast under the rubric of ‘trans.’
They use all that funding to overwhelm the public servants appointed to defend popular state legislation with activist litigation on behalf of Munchausen moms and WPATH and the Eunuch Archives.
Then the ACLU extorts the participation of every other civil rights concern in America by artifically tying their issues to ‘trans.’
The Distance is sending me to Washington, DC next week as sponsoring speaker in a demonstration against the ACLU in its current form. The ACLU is unfit for purpose. Public awareness begins with people making the public aware. We have the right to speak, and be heard, without being accused of harm for merely speaking. In the best tradition of past radicals, we will hold their feet to the fire by making them follow their own set of rules. Please consider helping LGB United sponsor my trip. There is too much to say; I cannot stay silent.
The ACLU Always Values the 'Free Speech' of Pedophiles Over Women and Children
I only ever use she/her to refer to the ACLU's great gay (or is it queer?) trans male lawyer who goes by the name of Chase Strangio. After all, isn't she all about queering everything that moves? If misgendering isn't the ultimate form of genderqueering, I don't know what is.
From West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which ruled unconstitutional a requirement that schoolchildren salute the American flag: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
From the National Institutes of Health, today (and enforced by a hefty fine in New York City):
"Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights."
"Correct" according to NIH, of course, means pronouns the person wants you to use, which may or may not reflect material reality (i.e. their sex). ( "Correct" in the sane world, of course, means "accurate.")
People can still use racial epithets in this country and be protected by the First Amendment. But referring to a man as a man is so egregiously hateful that your free speech rights count for nothing. It's mind-boggling.
Glad you're going to the rally, Matt. The more principled, intelligent, articulate voices against this madness, the better.