Month: June 2022

Note On The Final Dobbs Opinion [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

A threshold question before informed discussion can commence is “How did the final Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion change from the unethically leaked version everyone has been arguing about for many weeks?” A related question is whether the fact that the opinion was leaked, causing threats to the justices and harassment at their homes as well as a full-throated primal scream by abortion advocates, which encompasses most journalists and the entire Democratic Party, had any ameliorating effect on Justice Alito’s majority opinion.

The answer to that question is: “Nope! None whatsoever.” The uproar didn’t even dissuade Chief Justice Roberts from joining the majority, making Dobbs a 6-3 decision, though Roberts did write that he did not approve of over-ruling Roe.

As for the first, the answer is “Nothing substantive, just the additions one would expect in a final SCOTUS opinion.”

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Once Again, An Analysis Of A SCOTUS Decision Is Distorted By Emotion And Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

This is a problem. And I’m just talking now about the previous SCOTUS ruling that launched a freak-out yesterday. As you probably know by now, the leaked SCOTUS ruling rebuffing Roe v. Wade is no longer a leak.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down a restrictive “needs-based” concealed carry laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.  Even though Justice Thomas’s majority opinion was tight and clear as well as consistent with SCOTUS precedent as well as, of course, the Bill of Rights, such worthies as President Biden claimed that, in the President’s words, the ruling contradicted “common sense and the Constitution.”

What are the odds that Joe read the opinion before declaring that? I’d say “none.” Making such a statement while carrying the presumed authority of President without knowing what the Court’s analysis was is completely unethical and an abuse of position.

David Harsanyi, writing at RealClearPolitics, accurately writes,

The modern left doesn’t even bother pretending they believe the Supreme Court has a responsibility to act as a separate branch of government and adjudicate the constitutionality of law. Rather than even ostensibly offering legal reasons for their ire, Democrats simply demand the Supreme Court uphold public sentiment (or, rather what they claim is public sentiment), even though SCOTUS exists to ignore those pressures. The fact that that attitude has congealed as the norm in one of our major political parties does not bode well for the future of the Republic.

It is particularly disheartening that the three liberal justices in their dissent stooped to fueling this distortion of the Court’s role. Their arguments were almost all irrelevant to the  constitutional issues and the Court’s previous rulings regarding the Second Amendment. Instead, Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan took the low road of evoking recent shootings and incidents of gun violence as if current events should permit the limiting of explicit Constitutional rights. 

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Unethical Quote (And Tweet) Of The Month: Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow. I already have my Georgetown Law Center diploma hanging a foot off the floor and with its front to the wall. Now what?

Katyal  is a partner at the law firm of Hogan Lovells and serves as the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is supposed to be a Constitutional Law expert. How could he write that? The two opinions are not even slightly related, other than the fact that they both are Supreme Court cases and concern issues that Katyal’s allies and pals are adamant about. In the assumed opinion not yet released knocking down Roe v. Wade, the court is correcting its own error, and rejecting the contrived and much derided opinion that abortion is a right. It is not “ending” a constitutional right, because that right never existed in the first place. Today’s opinion striking down a New York law that asserted government’s power to decide when a law-abiding citizen “needed” to carry a gun in public did not create a new right. Unlike the imaginary right to choose to kill unborn humans, the right to bear arms is in the Bill of Rights. Continue reading →

PM Ethics Pie, 6/23/2022: Guns, Mostly

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On this date in 1972, the eventual ethics train wreck known as Title IX was passed. Its stated purpose was to prohibit sexual desecration on federally funded campuses, but since most of that discrimination was against women, the law was eventually weaponized to be an anti-male measure, notably by the Obama administration and its pressure on schools to employ a presumed guilty approach to student accusations of sexual harassment and assault. Title IX or something like it was clearly needed, but the law stands as a useful example of how, when a failure of ethics makes it necessary for law to step in, the law too often mucks things up.

1. Pop Ethics Quiz!

That’s a fantastic duo-costume at a cos-play convention: Peter Pan and his shadow! But is it offensive? Isn’t that “blackface”? If not, why not? Of course it isn’t supposed to evoke minstrel shows or be denigrating to blacks, but neither was Laurence Olivier’s make-up to play Othello on film. Define the rule for me. Continue reading →

I Lost On This Issue, But I Was Right

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The New York Times tells us today, “Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick.”

Gee.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

Some of the more intense discussions on Ethics Alarms, primarily with libertarians, arose from the unshakable position here that the government’s capitulation to marijuana legalization efforts would accomplish nothing but short and long-term damage to vulnerable populations, the young, and the nation generally. I saw the writing on the cultural wall long ago, when arrogant elites in entertainment, politics, journalism and other spheres declared pot “cool,” and my college associates began seeking to sit around bleary-eyed and moronic to actually having interesting discussions and doing things.

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Failures Of Proportion Make Failed Leadership Inevitable

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I am torn: this post screamed out for a Major Clipton introduction though the head-exploding tweet above by President Biden’s Chief of Staff (or head puppeteer) arguably needs no introduction. I think I’ll settle on both: we haven’t heard from the major for a while…

Proportion is an important ethical value that we don’t talk about enough. That idiotic tweet demonstrates a disastrous ethics flaw—not the only one, heaven knows–that underlies so much of the ongoing tragedy that is the progressive movement currently being inflicted on the nation by Biden and the Democrats.

Inflation is reaching crisis levels, harming virtually all Americans not candidates for a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The national debt has reached and exceeded and then exceeded more any rational level that a responsible country should tolerate. Yet the White House wants a victory lap because two women instead of the traditional one will have their signatures on the currency. Continue reading →

Tales From The Great Stupid, Law Enforcement Division: “Forget it, Jack, It’s Chicagoland…”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Chicago Police Department is establishing a new policy prohibiting its officers from chasing runaway suspects…not in cars, but on foot—you know, like NYPD Danny Reagan does just about every episode of “Blue Bloods.” Now suspects can run away from police, and the cops just have to stand there. Or as blogger Ed Driscoll deftly put it, now the police will have to say, “Stop! Or I’ll…have to tell you to stop again!

The policy also encourages cops to “consider alternatives” to pursuing someone who “is visibly armed with a firearm.” Yelling mean names sometimes works, I hear. Officers may give chase if they believe a person is committing or is about to commit a felony, a Class A misdemeanor like domestic battery, or a serious traffic offense that could risk injuring others, such as drunken driving or street racing. However, chasing a suspect because he or she runs away and appears to have a reason for doing so is out.

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Comment Of The Day: “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let this be a lesson to me: even what seems to be an obvious case of someone applying emotion, bias and ignorance when informed consideration is called for should not be dismissed out of hand without, well, informed consideration.

This Comment of the Day by Sarah B. was a consensus smash hit with Ethics Alarms commentariat, because she is experienced and knowledgeable on the topic, and educated us all.

Here is her comment on “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”…

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I was an engineer at a refinery. Now as a woman, my boss’s boss thought that I was incompetent (and was known to say that women should be in a home making her man happy instead of in an engineering department) and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to teach me mostly stuff I already knew. However, one day, his lecture was on the financials of the refining world and it rocked my whole world view. I’ll share it to emphasize the stupidity of this man and his protest.

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Ethics Dunce: Dave Chappelle

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I hate to call comic Dave Chappelle a weenie and a political correctness panderer, so instead I’ll settle for Ethics Dunce. He badly miscalculated here.

Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington D.C. had planned to rename its performance theater —I once co-wrote directed a show there!—after alumnus Dave Chappelle for his “ongoing commitment and service to the school.” Chappell, fresh off of his controversial Netflix concert that was attacked for its jokes about transsexual activism, appeared at the school in November and faced a barrage of criticism from predictably oriented students. He challenged opponents of his work and his advocates to compete to raise the most money for Duke Ellington, promising to abide by the winning group’s wishes regarding the performing space’s new name.

Well, his fans out-raised the pro-trans mob, but nonetheless, at the dedication of the newly-named theater this week, Chappelle announced that he would refuse the honor, and declared that the theater would be henceforward called “the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression.”

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