For those readers who are not familiar with Popehat’s Ken White, I offer this recent example of his deft ethics analysis and his perceptive and balanced commentary. I was going to write something that would have reached similar conclusions, but there is no point now. I can’t do better than this, and when I can do as well, it’s a good day.
Here is Ken’s commentary on the rodeo clown in the Obama mask.
“Hey! That’s Barbara! See you at work, Monday, Barbara!”
The Connecticut Law Tribune reports that Barbara Kalpin, a former legal secretary at the Waterbury law firm of Grady & Riley, has been charged with stealing more than $1 million while forging dozens of checks and documents.
She was, the story says, “a longtime and trusted employee at the firm.” It seems the firm’s trust was misplaced. Investigators have discovered that she spent about $500,000 over the last few years at an off-track betting venue in New Haven for horse and dog racing. According to police, she wrote 93 checks from a client fund that she managed, among other things using the money to pay credit card bills and to finance multiple mortgages on her home. Kalpin is facing two counts of first-degree larceny and 112 counts of second-degree forgery, and is awaiting arraignment next week.
Connecticut’s bar, like every that of every other state, imposes a strict obligation on attorneys to supervise non-lawyers who are placed in positions of assisting in legal work and the handling of client matters: Continue reading
Donnie McClurkin: Unfit to honor MLK Jr.?
Grammy Award-winning gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, who is African-American and also a pastor, is furious that he was dumped from the roster of performers at “Reflections on Peace: From Gandhi to King,” a city-sponsored concert on August 10 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, honoring the 50th anniversary of King’s March on Washington. He should be furious; so should any authentic follower of Dr. King. By targeting McClurkin, lesser men than King shamed his legacy by showing disdain for principles the martyred civil rights leader fought for, like tolerance, courage, honesty and inclusiveness. You see, McClurkin’s politically incorrect views on homosexuality rendered him, to the arbiters of political discourse, unfit to perform.
Courage among the District’s political leaders is almost in as short supply as trustworthiness, as city Mayor Vincent Gray demonstrated by caving to complaints made by, his office explained, a dozen people, including local gay activist and longtime civil rights advocate Phil Pannell. Pannell called the gospel singer’s public statements on homosexuality “vile.” Wow, a dozen people and one prominent activist! Pretty near a whole nation was opposed to King when he started his crusade for civil rights, and his successors can’t mount the courage to tell a dozen people advocating political discrimination to pound sand. Continue reading
WOW! What a great straw man!!!
There is a lot of solemn and indignant nonsense written on both sides of the abortion issue, but for mind-numbing muddle-headedness, Salon’s Katie McDonough deserves some kind of prize. In a jaw-dropping essay titled “Fetal Pain Is A Lie: How Phony Science Took Over The Abortion Debate,” she makes such a throbbing-neon straw man argument that it should be used in textbooks as an example of the technique, beginning with the very first statement under the headline,—“New laws banning abortion after 20 weeks are based on pseudoscience — and real research proves it conclusively.”
Real research “proves” nothing of the kind. The various laws banning late term abortions are based on the argument that there has to be a line where the fetus stops being treated by the law like a mass of cells with no rights or status as an individual, unless we’re ready to proceed down the slippery slope to the point where a woman gives birth, looks the kid over to see if she likes him, and bashes his brains out against the wall, legally of course, if she doesn’t. Continue reading
A home in Tanner, Alabama, after the events of April 3, 1974…
Here are the always thoughtful and often profound Fattymoon’s reflections, in the Comment of the Day, inspired by the post, Ethics Dunce: Photographer Jill Greenberg:
“This reminds me of the time I made a critical decision, on the spot, while covering the aftermath of a killing F5 tornado at Tanner, Alabama the night of April 3, 1974.
“Walter McGlocklin was walking away from me, carrying one of his two surviving daughters. He was cradling this little girl, her upper body and tear streaked face peeking just above her father’s right shoulder. The look of utter horror on her face! The lighting was perfect, an eerie cross hatch of flashlights and spotlights – I KNEW I had the picture of the year. I raised my Minolta 35 mm and focused in. And that’s when it happened. Something inside me said, Do NOT violate this little girl’s privacy. Do NOT allow this little girl’s unbearable pain to act as fodder to sell newspapers across the country. I slowly lowered my camera. It’s a decision, one of only a very few, of which I will forever be proud of.”
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Today I received this:
The commenter gave his name as “Ecig” and that “similar” blog is an e-cigarette advertising website. His comment about how irritating spam is is spam itself, one of the nearly 536,000 such comments that I have had to review individually since launching Ethics Alarms.|
A dishonest fake comment, purporting to complain about spam while constituting spam, sent to a blog about ethics.
Nice.
Poor, downtrodden, Alex Rodriguez and his wife…
Baseball’s most embarrassing super-star, the steroid cheat Alex Rodriguez, in playing for the New York Yankees while appealing his long suspension by Major League baseball. As he is unquestionably a repeat liar and a serial violator of the game’s rules against PED’s (performance enhancing drugs), as he signed a contract, in part generated by the results of his cheating, that will both enrich him by millions and handicap his team competitively while conferring few, if any benefits, as he would qualify, by most objective standards, as the antithesis of a sports hero, the fact that Arod, as he is called, still was cheered by a vocal minority in Yankee Stadium when he made his season debut this week is intriguing. What does this mean? Can it be ethical to cheer Rodriquez now?
These are deceptively complex and difficult questions. The threshold issue is whether cheering or jeering any sports figure, or any public figure at all, is an act with ethical content rather than just a communication of an opinion. Is it conduct, or just “words”? I think, in the context of the Rodriquez situation, a sound argument can be made that it is conduct. Registering group approval or disapproval of prominent conduct by someone of status and influence is a crucial societal function in setting standards, registering disapproval, and prompting shame, regret, apology and reform—none of which, so far at least, seem to register with Arod.
That is pretty clearly what the boos convey, but what about the cheers? If the boos are ethical—they are if the disapproval is proportionate, rational, fair, and just—then are the cheers automatically unethical? Not necessarily. Here are some of the things those cheers could be expressing: Continue reading
No, nobody’s saying you can’t advocate your beliefs, archaic and destructive though they may be. Just make sure they don’t stop people from buying flowers and cakes like everyone else…
I’ll spare you much commentary on this one, but it’s eye-opening in tone and content: an indignant, angry appeal to protest on the theory that legalizing same-sex marriage in Minnesota constitutes an attack on the freedom of religion.
A sample:
“Now over 1.4 Million Minnesotans are considered the legal equivalent of “bigots” and have NO protection to live out their beliefs in the public square. The gay “marriage” law allows churches and SOME religious organizations to define marriage as only between 1 man and 1 woman. But, people of faith know that living out your beliefs means living what you believe OUTSIDE the walls of your church.
“Gay “marriage” supporters and their allies in the MN Legislature seem to think that Minnesotans with deeply held religious beliefs about Marriage will be content to believe that marriage is the union of 1 man and 1 woman in the walls of their church and then stay SILENT about those beliefs outside those walls. So, the MN Legislature passed the gay “marriage” bill with no protections for people outside the walls of their church. The MN Senate had the chance—and refused—to protect the religious liberty rights of Minnesotans outside their church walls….Now Minnesotans with the deeply held belief that marriage is the union of 1 man and 1 woman cannot act on this belief in the way they do their business or the way they practice their profession.
“The Minnesota Department of Human Rights has already confirmed our worst fears: There is NO religious liberty protection for people of faith in the public square. The Department states specifically that nonreligious organizations are NOT exempt from the law and that nondiscrimination laws can (and will) be used as a weapon to punish people of faith. For example, if a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim florist refused to provide flowers for a same-sex “wedding” based on his religious beliefs, the same-sex couple can “file a claim with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights against the entity that discriminated against them.”
“Bottom Line? The gay “marriage” lobby and their allies in the MN Legislature view Minnesotans of faith as “bigots” and will punish them accordingly using MN Human Rights laws—forcing men and women of faith to choose between their livelihood and their convictions.
“That is not acceptable.” Continue reading
The Senator thinks it’s running backwards!
On the Shreveport Time website, Andre Dean Benton reports…
“I attended the Bossier City VFW Post 5951 discussion of Veterans’ issues with Senator Mary Landrieu last week at 1315 North Gate Road, where she responded to a wide range of issues facing our American veterans from her talking points as well as from questions fielded from the audience. An older veteran stood up toward the middle of the meeting and expressed to her his deep sadness and concern with the massive and constantly growing American debt ($16.9 trillion today and $5.6 trillion in 2000) and the crippling cost to taxpayers to pay for the staggering interest on that debt….
I was stunned to then hear my Louisiana senator defend the massive U.S. debt saying: “That is not true, sir! We do not have an increasing national debt! For the past six to seven years we have been continuously driving that debt down and reducing it and it is NOT increasing.” She then went on to explain the federal costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as “non-negotiable mandates by law that cannot be changed” and explained that only a small portion of the federal budget was in discretionary spending, where she was working with others in the Senate to further reduce our nation’s debt….
“No one on her staff corrected her or offered a polite “update” for the audience, and the elderly gentleman speaking the question was a little rattled by her vigorous contradiction of his stated facts that he just mumbled something across the table from me about “Congress constantly raising the debt ceiling …” and then was respectfully silent. As he was asking and our senator was responding, I was Googling the US Treasury’s official home page on my iPhone and staring at the government published facts on the history and facts about the U.S. debt: Continue reading
—–Law professors Charles Geyh and Stephen Gillers, arguing in Politico for the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a Code of Ethics.
“Codes of ethics? We don’ need no stinkin’ codes of ethics!”
The U.S. Supreme Court, it might surprise you to know, is the only court in the U.S. without a formal Code of Ethics that its judges are required to follow. The idea appears to be that if one has risen to the tippity-top of the judicial tree, one’s ethics must be impeccable as matter of course.
Right.
On Politico, Charles Geyh and Stephen Gillers make a convincing argument that SCOTUS should not only hold itself to high ethical standards, but also make it clear to all what those standards are.
You can read the entire post here.
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Pointer: Legal Ethics Forum
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