Year: 2012

The Susan G. Komen Foundation-Planned Parenthood Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Unlike the 26 U.S. Senators who are unethically abusing their positions by presuming to demand that an independent non profit organization expend its funds according to their interests, I am not going to tell the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation how to pursue its mission…because as with the Senators, it is none of my business. Ethics is my business, and the full-blown ethics train wreck surrounding the Foundation’s decision to end its substantial financial support of Planned Parenthood has been created by dishonesty, misrepresentation and a lack of fairness from all directions.

Here are some unpopular ethics truths in this fiasco. Continue reading →

Tales Of Ethics Dunces Past: Recalling the Self-Indulgent Suicide of Hunter Thompson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t claim that I am surprised that my post about the suicide of Don Cornelius attracted comments that either showed a misunderstanding of what I wrote or a stubborn determination to change the subject. It was not a post about the virtues of suicide, but about how suicide’sethical calculations may be changing as a broken medical care system increasingly makes the final years and months of the elderly a burden that crushes families and constricts the quality of life  for the nation generally. In short, killing yourself for your country may have to become an accepted practice, an ethical and courageous act, if something doesn’t change. Killing yourself for yourself—to avoid pain, problems, or the consequences of your own actions, should always be considered wrong, for wrong it is.

Jeff Hibbert, one of my favorite contributors here and also one with a great memory, reminded me that I had written on this topic once before. I had forgotten, but that post may be a useful contrast to the Cornelius post. There is not a word of it that I don’t still believe. It concerned the 2005 suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the cult “gonzo journalist” who lived like frat boy and  wrote like angel. Here it is:

Hunter Thompson’s values were admittedly always a little out of whack, but nothing diminished the self-styled “gonzo journalist” in this world so much as his manner of leaving it. He shot himself to death last February while talking on the phone to his wife, with both his son and grandson in his house with him. Nice. That should guarantee some lucky psychoanalyst or three a comfy income for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“I think it’s a stupid thing. I think it’s stupid for anyone, whether they’re celebrated or not, I don’t believe their 911 calls should be broadcast around the world.” 

"Poor Demi! The public has a right to hear us humiliate her."

—-Actor George Clooney, speaking during Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards.  He was referring to the release and subsequent airing of a 911 call from a woman summoning rescue workers for actress Demi Moore, who, the caller said, was convulsing and had lapsed into semi-conscious.

Good call, George.

911 calls are considered public, but that doesn’t mean that the public needs or has to hear them, or that sleaze-factories like TMZ should put them online when their only purpose is titillation and to embarrass celebrities. There may be special circumstances that justify making a recording of a 911 call, rather than a  transcript, available to the public, but those should be exceptions. In cases like Moore’s, playing them is unfair and unkind, a clear Golden Rule violation, not that TMZ, or most journalists for that matter, would know about that.

If the media can’t control itself when it comes into possession of a 911 call that will embarrass someone who already has enough problems to deal with, then we need laws to keep 911 calls out of irresponsible hands…in other words, the news media’s hands.
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Don Cornelius, Suicide…and Ethics Hero?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Soul Train” creator and pop culture icon Don Cornelius took his own life at 75 yesterday, using a gunshot to the head to do it. Suicide always conjures up feelings of special sadness for the deceased, sometimes mixed with anger. The act can be cruel and devastating to family members and friends; often it leaves behind crushing problems, financial and otherwise, that the living have to deal with. Suicide is stigmatized in our culture as a coward’s way out of earthly problems; many religions consider it a sin, and many legal systems consider suicide a crime. Yet it may be that American culture will have to undergo a major cultural transformation in the matter of taking one’s own life. While morality tends to ossify, ethics is fluid and adaptable. Changing conditions and new realities can, in rare circumstances, cause societies to conclude that what was once considered right is really wrong, and what was once condemned as wrong is in society’s best interests. I think we may reach that point with suicide. Continue reading →

Scylla and Charybdis in the Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is Scylla. Charybdis is in the teachers lounge.

Responding to one of the recent posts here about the deteriorating relationships between students, teachers and administrator, teacher Brook Styler alerted us to his own crisis, a situation right out of “The Children’s Hour” in which vengeful female students, aided and abetted by parents, circulated rumors that lost him his job.

Styler has launched a website, Teacher Hunt, to collect the experiences of teachers, who, like him, have been victimized by false accusations from students. I plan on visiting it often. But the site appears at a time in which teachers using their students for sexual gratification is either on the rise, or is being uncovered with remarkable efficiency. Every day, one or more cases of teachers preying on students is in the news. Yesterday, it was Rachel L. Farrell, 25, a  Bangor, Maine  high school teacher  charged with having sex with a 17-year-old student on “numerous occasions” while she was supposed to be tutoring him in English. Authorities believe she had sexual relations with as many as three other students. Today, it was the still unfolding horror of Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in the Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone, who was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children after over 400 photos were discovered by a CVS clerk, showing pornographic conduct involving his students (age 7-10) over a five year period. Berndt, now being held on $23 million bail, regularly told his students that they were going to play a “tasting game,” in which children were blindfolded and, in some cases, gagged with tape, authorities say. They were then fed the teacher’s semen, administered to them on a blue plastic spoon and, according to one alleged victim’s father, on cookies.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, can you? Continue reading →

“Pay-What-You-Can” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A live performance of Jules Feiffer's "Little Murders" at a regional theater in Arlington, Va. that holds "pay-what-you-can" performances over the periodic objections of its artistic director, me.

Toronto Star ethics columnist Ken Gallinger does a pretty good job today answering a query from a financially strapped theater-lover who feels guilty about attending “pay-what-you-can” professional stage productions. “…My husband says paying less than full fare takes advantage of the theatre company. Technically, we could pay the ticket price; we still have access to credit. And there are things we could cancel…What do you think?” asks the inquirer.

Gallinger explains the benefits to the company of not having a sea of empty seats facing the actors, and also how discount tickets have promotional value to theater companies. All true: the theater companies wouldn’t offer “pay-what-you-can” if they didn’t think it was in their companies’ long term interest. There are other benefits that Gallinger doesn’t mention. For example, the increased audience size still contributes to the average audience statistics that a non-profit company can use to seek advertisements and to argue for community foundation grants.

Even this wouldn’t cover the topic, however. “Pay-what-you-can” and other discount ticket programs are essential if theater companies are going to meet their own ethical obligations to the community, and if live theater is going to survive at all. The ticket prices at most large, established regional theaters are, in a word, unconscionable. Justifiable perhaps, since live theater costs more to produce than can be paid for by box office receipts, but still unconscionable. Continue reading →

And May The Best Man Win

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As of 1:20 AM, Newt Gingrich had not congratulated Mitt Romney on his Florida Primary win (clobbering Newt), nor did he offer the traditional congratulations to the winner in his concession speech.

I’ll grant Newt this: it isn’t as if he’s pretending to be what he’s not…gracious, fair, respectful, polite, humble, classy. I guess that represents a certain kind of integrity…the integrity to be a jerk, and to be open and unapologetic about it.

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I found Michael’s personal and heart-felt reflections on the fact that Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has been distinguishing herself so-called “1%” thought-provoking on many levels. Its relevance to the Golden Rule is especially interesting. How can we treat others as we would want to be treated if we were them, when we don’t have sufficient common experiences to know what those others want and need? When a politician claims to be “one of us” and really is not, it is more than a misrepresentation. It is an appeal to trust based on false information.

Here is Michael’s Comment of the Day, on the post Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz:

” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

—-Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a retired professor from Cal State East Bay, addressing a rally this weekend of the Occupy Oakland  group, which fought police in a pitched battle that ended with 400 arrests.

I said that the Occupy movement would end badly, and it is, not that it should have taken advanced psi-powers to divine that a protest based on ignorance, envy and anarchy with no practical and constructive proposals to offer would eventually end in violence, anger and ugliness. Hate is what it has come down to now, and the party and supporters of the President who came to office promising hope are now pinning their hopes on a sad movement fueled by hate. To say that the protests are also unethical is to flog the obvious. They have cost communities millions of dollars that will be made up in cut services; they have soiled parks and public places, they have provided a meeting place for thugs, vagrants, criminals, and worse ( an Occupier was arrested over the weekend for strangling his parents), and they have embodied a cultural rejection of personal responsibility.

Not to mention an escape from reality.“The fact that everyone now talks about the 99 percent, the 1 percent – that shows Occupy’s won,”  Carter Lavin, 23, of Oakland told the press. “The debate was about debt, not jobs. Now it’s about jobs.”

Sure, Carter. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Hair, Rules, School, and the Cancer Survivor

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

"I think this has gone far enough, son."

I’m really not picking on the schools, though I’m sure it looks that way. There have just been a wave of strange controversies lately in the halls of academe….like the travails of  J.T. Gaskins, 17, who is fighting with his charter school near Flint, Michigan.

J.T. is a model student; in fact, he was honored on his high school’s “Wall of Fame” for perfect behavior. But he’s doing his school work from home these days after being suspended by the school governing board of Madison Academy in Burton, Michigan. The reason:  the length of his hair. J.T. is a leukemia survivor, and he decided over the holidays to grow out his hair, cut it all off and give it to a non-profit group called Locks of Love, which donates hairpieces to kids undergoing cancer treatments. He was inspired to get growing after learning that the sister of a family friend had cancer.

Gaskins’ long hair is violating school policy, however, and he was told to cut it, or go home. So home he went. “I fought cancer my entire life. I’m going to keep fighting this,” he said. “I’m not going to not give back just because my school says no.” Continue reading →