Here are some quick links and observations to get your ethical juices going this Sunday…

• I was very critical of the New York Times’ successor to Randy Cohen as “The Ethicist” for an awful opinion a couple of weeks ago. She had a clean column last Sunday, however, and her responses to two inquirers in her column this week, one regarding whether telling all the families of WWII casualties that their sons “died heroes” is ethical, and the other concerning how to deal with an acquaintance who is exhibiting stolen art in his home, are outstanding.

• Now THIS is a caring, concerned professional: a teacher at Seattle’s Kentlake High School  performed oral sex on a 17-year-old student after he pronounced himself “suicidal” over his breakup with his girlfriend. She then continued to pursue the boy for sexual encounters, presumably to cure his depression. It worked, too: the boy told authorities that she was the best math teacher he ever had.  The math teacher, 37, has not yet been formally charged and has been placed on administrative leave. Let’s see: breach of trust, abuse of power, dishonesty, conflict of interest, criminal activity…if she’s as good at teaching math as she is at demonstrating unethical teacher conduct, Kentlake High has a real gem.

• She has to take a back seat, however, in the breach of trust and abuse of power department, to Brent Girouex, 31, a former youth pastor in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He says he had sex with teenage boys because it was his pastoral duty “to help (the teen) with homosexual urges.”  He has been arrested on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist. Girouex told Council Bluffs police detectives that he had sexual contact with four young men starting in 2007 in order to help them gain “sexual purity in the eyes of God.” Right.

• The next time you hear a political candidate or elected official talk about how the budget defivit can be fixed by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” it would be prudent to reflect on the saga of Philip F. Laverriere Sr., the head of Lawrence, Massachusetts’ primary anti-poverty agency. Laverriere, 85, was head of the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council for 37 years. It has 310 employees and oversees poverty programs like immigration assistance, heat subsidies, and child care with a $30 million budget funded almost entirely through state and federal money. This week, he quit—after the press disclosed that he spent as few as 15 hours a week at his job, while earning $144,000 a year. The rest of the work day, Laverriere could be found at  the local Elks Club playing card games and video poker. The lesson: Big bureaucracies with large budgets, great pensions and little oversight—in other words, government agencies—have always attracted the lazy, the incompetent, the venal and the untrustworthy as well as dedicated public servants, and always will. The only way to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in government is to have less government, and if the conclusion is that less government is not desirable, waste, fraud and abuse needs to be treated as acknowledged overhead. Oh…this dedicated public servant walked out the door with a final check for a $9,829.91.

Unused vacation time!