Trans Activism Ethics Train Wreck Caboose: The “Hadestown” Affair

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The producers of hit Broadway musical “Hadestown” have fired veteran musical theater star Geno Segers from the cast. Though the the production did not announce a reason for the decision, everyone in the industry knows what lost him the job.

Segers had taken to social media to posted his views on transgender athletes playing in women’s sports. “I don’t see transgender people becoming oppressed or being oppressed … life is unfair” he posted, along with, “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people. That’s a little bit foul.” He also mocked the posting of preferred pronouns: “If you asked me what my preferred pronouns are and it’s not obvious to you that I’m a he/him, that I’m good with he/him — Surely you don’t need any help. I’m not wearing a dress.”

The social media Furies descended on the actor with a vengeance, accusing him of being transphobic, homophobic, yada yada. You know the script.

Prof. Turley believes that the performer’s human rights have been unfairly and hypocritically “curtailed,” writing in part,

“Other actors have expressed support for transgender players without any response other than praise in the latest example of the rising McCarthyism on the left.This is only the latest termination over the political views of artists in New York. As the song states in Hadestown, “It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it anyway.” We have previously discussed how private companies can fire employees for public conduct or statements that bring controversy to their business or products. However, even though the First Amendment does not govern such controversies, there remains a free speech issue. Free speech goes beyond the confines of the First Amendment and private companies can engage in censorship that curtails this human right. The question often comes down to consistency in companies enforcing content-based standards. I did not like some of the comments of Segers, but there is little question that equally strong comments against “cisgender” athletes or for transgender athletes would not result in such termination…Whether it is actors, athletes, or academics, there is a demonstrably different level of tolerance for controversial views on gender. Take Segers’ statements, swap the nouns or pronouns, and ask yourself if there would have been a cancel campaign, let alone a termination. It is not the fact of the controversy but the lack of consistency that is so problematic in these areas.”

Yes, but. This is Broadway, and a Broadway musical. Broadway is hurting for box office these days, and its ticket prices exclude all but the relatively wealthy. Musicals are especially dependent on the the affluent LGTBQ demographic: I would wager that the percentage of gay Americans who have heard of “Hadestown” is double or more the percentage of non-LGTBQ members of the public. Having a prominent cast member in a Broadway musical making public comments that are likely to offend its core audience is unacceptable, and the producers were only protecting their show, their investment, and the rest of the company by sending Segers packing.

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Wrong! Athletes Should Shut Up About Political and Social Issues and Do What They Are Paid To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.

As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”

But no.

“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.

The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).

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A Final Complaint About “The Odyssey”…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If I don’t get this posted, it will keep me up all night…

I keep reading that Sinon, that non-Homeric character played by Eliot Page, is crucial to understanding Odysseus’s guilt. Sinon, after he’s dead (above), complains that Odysseus deceived him and set him up to be killed. Odysseus argues that he was necessary collateral damage, which by any standard of warfare, especially ancient warfare, is exactly right, but never mind that: I can’t imagine how the deception of Sinon was achieved. His fellow colleagues were building a huge wooden horse on the beach. It took a long time. Odysseus and the other Greek soldiers had to climb into the horse. Where was Sinon when this was happening?

How was all of the noisy and complex operation kept from Sinon? When did Odysseus communicate the “This horse is a gift from the gods so be sure to tell the Trojans that” lie to him? Then what, he told Sinon to close his eyes and count to ten, and when Sinon opened his eyes, he didn’t suspect that his general had climbed into the wooden horse? Or did wily Odysseus leave a note for Sinon on the beach that said, “Hey, sorry, I’ve left with the rest of the ships, but I saw a big wooden horse on the beach. My guess is that it’s a gift from Poseidon. Hang around and tell the Trojans. Good luck!”?

The classic myth about Sinon is that he was a willing martyr to the cause, and stayed behind to assist in the deadly deception of the Trojans. That makes sense, but Nolan’s rewrite seems impossible.

It’s like the mystery of the Mary Celeste! No matter how I try, I can’t construct a plausible sequence where the Greeks fake leaving, everyone climbs into a wooden horse that was assembled on the beach, and Odysseus lies successfully to the sole remaining Greek soldier about the provenance of the horse.

Well, I Finally Saw “The Odyssey,” Kind Of, And I Have Some Ethics Observations, PART II [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
More about an unethically disappointing movie

When I left you in Part I, I was cataloguing the incompetence of the movie’s director, who some critics, probably all Batman fans, appear to regard as Orson Welles, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg and William Wyler rolled up in one.

Upon reflection, I need to mention another example at the risk of exposing my lack of fair reference since I never saw the second half of the movie.

Based on various reviews and analyses, I know that many aspects of the performances (Damon seems depressed and unengaged) and the unfolding story ( Why is Athena so passive?) are allegedly explained or justified by revelations in the film’s last scenes. However, with the exception of gimmick films like “The Sixth Sense,” in which fooling the audience is the central purpose of the movie, that is unconscionable story-telling, especially in a three hour movie. Finding out after Matt Damon has bored you stiff for hours and you’ve been wondering “Where the hell are all the gods?” the answer to the puzzle—“Oh! I see! Odysseus is depressed! Its complex PTSD! Now I realize in retrospect that I really enjoyed his nuanced portrayal of a serious human malady!” and “That’s it! There aren’t any gods, and “Athena” was just the hero’s way of dealing with the girls he saw beheaded!”—is unfair to the audience, to the actors, and to the source material. Rare directors, with the right material, can pull that trick off. If the first half of the movie loses the audience, it’s impossible.

2. Incompetence: The screenplay! The dialogue! Nolan is responsible for both, and shame on him. I don’t know that I have ever watched a major movie with such amateurish, hackneyed, stilted dialogue…when you could hear the dialogue. Here I have to also blame the actors as well. At least the stars have some control over what they say. Damon’s dialogue in particular was awful. He has the juice (so does Hathaway) to pull the director aside and say, “Come on. I can’t say that. Fix it.” This may be another example of how Nolan’s inflated reputation for being a genius harmed the film.

As for the screenplay, whoever got Nolan hooked on “Zeus’s Law” should be stuffed in a barrel filled with fat Lithuanian midgets. The best take-down of this thematic conceit comes from Emily Wilson appropriately enough, the scholar who wrote the translation of Homer that Nolan allegedly adapted for his movie, and who wrote, by far, the most thorough and intelligent review of it as well. (She hated it.)

After noting the obvious, that it’s weird how everyone blathers on about Zeus’s Law but Zeus is nowhere to be seen, and Odysseus doesn’t believe in the gods anyway unless they hang around as surrogates for headless girls, Wilson writes,

(See, Alizia? That’s an ethical “appeal to authority,” the opinion of a Homer scholar who has read the work in Greek and wrote the translation the film she’s critiquing was based on.)

Bingo! The movie, characters and plot as envisioned by Nolan are ethically incoherent. (I had the same complaint about Nolan’s Batman movies.)

Remaining notes:

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Well, I Finally Saw “The Odyssey,” Kind Of, And I Have Some Ethics Observations, PART I [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Let me begin with a few critical observations, some with ethical overtones.

First of all, “The Odyssey” stinks.** It isn’t a massive, A-bomb of a movie, like “Snow White,” but its quality has to be measured in contrast to a) the embarrassing number of critical raves by people who are supposedly watching movies for a living, and b) the movie’s undeserved box office success. Hollywood is excited that Christopher Nolan’s latest over-praised film is getting people to leave their TV screens for the audience experience, and they should be. It is tragic that the draw isn’t a great movie. Or a good one. Or even a meh one.

I went into the theater with a completely open mind. I love both “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey.” I love classic spectacles, and many reviews told me I would see one worthy of the great Cecil B. DeMille. I have no bias against Nolan or for him. I do not understand his critical sanctification.

In full disclosure, I must reveal that I did not see the whole movie. At almost exactly the half-way mark (90 minutes), my female companion, a private tutor who knew Homer’s version well and whom I had invited to see the film after she complained that none of her friends would see it with her, turned to me (I thought she was asleep) and said, “I have to get up early tomorrow, and this is terrible. Let me know how bad it is from here.” And I said: “I’m coming with you.” As a director and performer, I caught several media reviewers publishing full reviews of a show of mine when they had left mid-way and not revealed this in their review. That’s unethical: I got one of them fired for doing it. In this instance, I will issue a disclaimer: It is possible that the second half of “The Odyssey” redeems the first half. If so, out of the hundreds of films I have seen over my life, it would be the first movie that accomplished that feat after such a soporific, pompous, annoying beginning. It would be like “The Terror of Tiny Town” suddenly turning into “High Noon.”

My second point is that, to my surprise, there is nothing overtly political (or “woke”) about Nolan’s film at all, which means that confirmation bias warped the perceptions of both the Left and the Right on a grand scale. All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. I would add “politics ruins everything” in 2026, but the film hit the screen ruined, and politics isn’t what ruined it.

On to the ethical and quasi-ethical observations…

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National Anthem Ethics, or “Poor Martha Reeves!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

What was the Motown legend thinking? This rendition is epically, tragically bad, if not the worst “Star Spangled Banner” ever, certainly the worst within memory by a professional performer. Then, of course, there was this…

But I digress., As you can see from the video at the first game of the new Women’s Professional Baseball League, people were trying to suppress giggles during this musical train wreck. Martha tried to maintain some shred of dignity and talk her way out of near certain enshrinement in the National Anthem Rendition Hall of Shame with such worthies as Robert Goulet and Fergie, telling TMZ,

“Having just celebrated my 85th birthday, I’ve learned a great deal over more than 60 years of performing live. It was an incredible honor to be invited to perform at the inaugural Women’s Professional Baseball League event and to help celebrate such a historic moment for women in sports. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The field conditions were wet and windy, and without stage monitors I wasn’t able to hear myself as I normally would. While it wasn’t the performance I had hoped for, I’m grateful to have been there in support of these remarkable athletes and this groundbreaking league.”

Ah. So we now know Martha’s 85, that the field conditions were against her and the tech was inadequate. Uh-uh. Martha can’t sing that difficult song now, and that’s nothing to feel badly about at her age. Why did she agree to do it? Did she really want to have her performance judged by the “It was pretty good for an 85-year-old whose voice is shot” standard? A crucial moment for all ethical performers (including athletes) is to know when to quit. The critical sub category for vocalists of note: Knowing when to stop trying to sing the National Anthem before baseball games.

I will give Martha this compliment, and I mean it sincerely. When the song was falling apart, she never hesitated, never showed her distress, and soldiered on bravely to the end. That’s a pro in action. I have been where Martha was, not on a baseball field but on stages where my moment in the spot light was spinning out of control. You can’t stop the music and you can’t hide. You don’t show your horror, and you do your job—badly, but you finish it.

Then you smile, take your bow, leave, and find a good friend to talk you out of shooting yourself.

___________________

Pointer: JutGory.

Thank-You, Professor Turley, For Reading Biden’s Interviews With His Biographer, So We Didn’t Have To…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…confirming that Ethics Alarms was right all along, and that defenders of Biden, the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the lawfare against President Trump are lying or demented, just like Biden was, when they kept insisting (and STILL insist!) that there is “nothing to see here.” [I used the “Naked Gun” clip from the Ethics Alarms clip archive because I’m sick of Fredo.]

This is another one of those essays that I want to shake in the faces of my dear, Trump Deranged friends and assholes who continue to deny, deny, deny reality on Facebook and in contentious phone conversations. You should read all of Turley’s column, “The Confession of Joe Biden,” but here are some teasers—and note: Professor Turley is a lawyer, constitutional law expert, a law professor, and, in my estimation, an unusually unbiased analyst.

Heeeeeere’s Jonnie!

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Monday Morning Ethics Warmup, 8/3/26

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

It seems like a good time for one of these. I was working throughout the weekend and couldn’t take the time to ponder several interesting and important ethics developments. I’m also thinking a lot about the future of EA. Both my accountant and my gratis office consultant excoriated me last month for spending the two to three hours I devote every day to researching and writing posts as well as replying to comments (19, 722 posts since late 2009 and 69, 698 personal responses) and demanded that I figure out a way to monetize my work, especially since I have rather serious financial problems that have only become worse since my wife dropped dead in early 2024 (ProEthics is at least a two professional job, and my cloning experiments have failed). Neither understands that Ethics Alarms exists to fulfill the mission of both my business and me personally, which is to inspire, educate, and engage willing people regarding the important role societal ethics must have in the United States, and to do so in a style that isn’t pedantic, academic, or flaccid.

If I could find a way to monetize the website without significantly reducing its readership (“Surely nobody’s going to quit if you had a $50 a year subscription!,” my accountant said. Really? I only have five commenters now when the blog is free…**) My office consultant quit over the matter (and some other things), and hasn’t spoken to me since the discussion about EA.

Well, I’m not going to solve that conundrum today: I have promises to keep, and before I sleep I’m going to see “The Odyssey” tonight, primarily to assess the validity of the political complaints, and I had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop a post about people who condemn the film based on hearsay (you know, like I did).

OK, enough about me. Here are my briefer thoughts about…

1. Trans activist insanity. “Jeopardy!” nerd-turned-host Ken Jennings is being attacked on BlueSky for being “transphobic.” Why? Apparently the New York Times is unpopular with the radical pro-trans mob because the paper hasn’t been as aggressive in its pro-woke propaganda efforts on their behalf as with other issues. Jennings had written on the censorious, intolerant, left-wing alternative to Twitter/”X” that he plays the online Times game “Wordle” with his wife every day. This was typical of the BlueSky outrage: “I wish people who care about trans people could understand that playing NYT games is still an insult to trans people.”

To his credit, Jennings has so far refused to dignify the insanity with a serious response. “This may be true of others but I actually got express permission from the trans community to keep NYT games and recipes,” he replied to the lunatic. “I also have a news subscription, which is arguably worse, so I had to specifically send in a written request. Took 30 days but I got it approved. They were like ‘trans people are not a monolith’ and ‘like-minded allies may disagree on specific media boycotts’ and stuff like that. It was a huge load off my mind!” Naturally, this just triggered the crazies more, and Jennings is now under daily attack, with calls for boycotts of the iconic quiz show he hosts and for him to be fired.

As of today, Jennings has refused to grovel an apology (or to stop playing Wordle). But why would he have an account on BlueSky if he weren’t hostage to The Great Stupid’s bubble?

2. Speaking of fearless truth-tellers who refuse to be intimidated…J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author who has been vilified world-wide for simply expressing common sense and logic regarding trans insanity, posted a masterpiece on “X” along with a frighting video of a rant by a self-declared woman who not only looks and sounds male, “she” looks and sounds like a male maniac. This is not going to get Rowling off the LGBTQ+ hate list:

If you don’t think he’s a woman, you’re transphobic. When he claimed to be a woman, he became a woman. He now belongs in women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, hospital wards, prison cells and rape support centres.

If you try and differentiate between him and a trans woman who looks more convincing as a woman, you are promoting patriarchal beauty norms. If you admit to seeing an aggressive and possibly unbalanced man in this video, you’re saying all trans people are mentally ill predators. If you refuse to let him into female-only spaces, you’re removing his right to exist. If you suggest he could comfortably use male facilities, you secretly want him assaulted. If you refuse to call him ‘she’, you are guilty of unpardonable cruelty. If you’re a woman who wouldn’t want to share a locker room with him, or a man who wouldn’t want your daughter, sister or mother to get undressed in close proximity to him, you belong to the far-right. If you point out that there is no objective difference between his claim to be a woman and that of any other biological male claiming a trans identity, you are too stupid to understand the circular arguments explaining why he’s not really trans whereas other men who say they’re women are really trans.

If you’re righteous, you must argue that this man’s self-declared identity overrides any consideration of the safety and rights of females. To be godly, you must agree he’s as ‘valid’ as every other trans woman, because people are who they say they are. No matter what your eyes, ears and common sense are telling you, if you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of history, you must pretend to believe that this angry, intimidating man is actually a vulnerable, oppressed woman.

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Baseball Ethics: The Evil, and All-American, LA Dodgers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know, 50% of you will skip this one…and I pity you.

Today is a big crazy day for baseball fans: it is the MLB trade deadline, when those teams that feel they have a chance at post-season glory and World Series immortality will try to acquire significant reinforcements from the teams that have given up hope. The latter teams will dump contracts while trying to acquire younger, cheaper players, many still confined to the minor leagues, so “Wait until next year!” has a chance of coming true for their disappointed fans.

The event has become important since baseball emulated the other professional sports by diluting the importance of the regular season by increasing the number of teams that can qualify for the play-offs. As I have written in the past, I detest this development, which is a deformed offspring on the free agent system. After today, the 30 teams will have split into mostly non-competitive pushovers playing out the last two months without hope and much superior teams “going for the gold.”

The biggest star and the most valuable player in these annual sweepstakes is Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the consensus choice as the Best Starting Pitcher in Captivity. Skubal has won the AL Cy Young Award two straight years. It is his free agent year, and the Tigers know his asking price to re-sign in beyond their resources. The team had to trade him now, and almost every team with a ghost of a chance to get to the World Series would love to have him. Who traded for him yesterday? Shockingly the one team that didn’t need him: the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers have won the World Series two years in a row, they are locks to win their division again, they have the most money and the largest payroll in the game, and basically have a team of All-Stars without Skubal. The trade reignited a protest in the sports media and on barstools that the Dodgers were unethically greedy and “ruining baseball” by monopolizing talent, emulating the New York Yankees dominance during baseball’s first century. (The classic 1950s musical “Damn Yankees” was adapted from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost The Pennant.”) My view: Nonsense. AOC, Bernie and Mayor Mamdani like that argument, because they are communists. The Dodgers have succeeded because they are well-run and make smart decisions, including making many that benefit fans at the sacrifice of the bottom line. Baseball, alone among team sports, promotes individualism, exceptionalism, and capitalist values. Teams are not are not limited regarding their payrolls, and players are not limited regarding how much money they demand to play. Furthermore, baseball has traditionally benefited by having teams playing the role of The Evil Empire. It’s like the villains in professional wrestling.

[Full disclosure: My feelings on the matter might be influenced a tiny bit by the fact that the Boston Red Sox, currently on a historic winning streak that pulled them out of today’s class of pathetic white flag-waivers into the mob of hopeful “buyers” (23 wins in the last 26 games) swept the Evil Dodgers in a three game series in LA, winning last night 8-4.]

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Indiana Fever Coach Stephanie White

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I don’t know that I would say that I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint.I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t. I do think when we think about various levels of sport, various governing bodies of sport and things that go into that, like I said, I’m not, I’m not educated enough at the different levels. I know growing up, I played with the boys all the time.”

—–WNBA’s Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, asked to expound on the controversy around her star guard, Sophie Cunningham, who has aroused the ire of transgender activists by stating her opinion that young girls in sports should not be made to compete against biological men.

What a pusillanimous, ignorant, disingenuous statement. White would have been better of to simply state that her policy is not to comment on matters that do not concern the WNBA or her job as coach. Her statement is on the same offensive level as woke Justice Jackson saying that she can’t define what a woman is.

How “educated” does one have to be to look at this…

or this..

….and conclude, “You know, that doesn’t look fair to me” ? How hard is that?

It’s hard for Wilson because, unlike Cunningham, she’s afraid of the vengeance of the radical left and its woke enforcers. Cunningham is a role model for young women who take seriously the feminist credo of not behaving passively, fearfully and compliantly or avoiding the role of a leader because that’s how ladies are expected to behave. She said regarding her trans-females in sports opinion when recently interviewed about the attacks on her for standing up for women and reality, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

Ah, but do you have the scientific training to have common sense?

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