Month: July 2022

Ethics Quiz: Travails Of A Transgender Sex Offender

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As Samuel L. Jackson would say if he were preparing to delve into this ethics quiz:

“Ella” is transgender woman now, whatever that means, but back when Ella was a 15-year-old boy, and stood 6-foot, 5-inches while weighing in at more than 300 pounds, she, though then a he, joined another teen in sexually assaulting a 110 pound autistic 14-year-old boy who was blind in one eye and autistic. The Pre-Ella then taunted the kid on Facebook. The male predecessor of Ella pleaded no contest to one count of sexual assault of a child under 16 years of age and spent time in two juvenile detention and treatment centers. Somewhere along the way Ella decided she needed to transition to female-hood, so when, in her new female-identifying edition, she was ordered to register as a sex offender, she objected. Under Wisconsin law, sex offenders must register a legal name and any aliases they use, and they may not legally change their name. That seems reasonable, since there is no point to legally registering as a sex offender to alert the community of sex offending proclivities if one can just foil the measure by using a different name.

Ella has been “Ella” since her teens and is now 22. She argued that requiring her to register as a sex offender under her male name given at birth violates her First Amendment right to express her true female identity. She also contended the registry requirement, as applied to her, amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, in essence making her out herself as a former him, or a former him trapped in a female body, or something.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals rejected Ella’s claims,  and last week, four mean old conservatives outvoted the court’s liberal members on the Wisconsin Supreme Court also denied Ella’s attempt to change her name after hearing arguments in the case in February. Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Morton’s Steak House Is Right, And Above The Law, Karine Jean-Pierre And The Rest Are Assholes

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Unfortunately, no word but the A-word will do, once again.

It’s disturbing and ominous that one half of the U.S. political culture has embraced vigorous assholery as part of its ideology, but yesterday’s exchange of positions regarding the right to enjoy one’s life shows that no other conclusion is plausible.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to dine in the Washington DC Morton’s Steak House earlier this week, and assholes calling themselves  protesters (they were gathered by the “ShutDown DC” activist group) showed up outside the restaurant after receiving a tip from other assholes that Kavanaugh was there.

“While the badasses @OurRightsDC and his own neighbors are gathered outside #Kavanaugh’s home, the justice seems to have snuck out for a swanky DC dinner,” the group posted on Twitter. “We got a tip from someone who spotted him around 7:40. DM us if you want to join him…we’re sure he can pull up a seat!” Student loan forgiveness activist Melissa Byrne (now there is another political position devoid of ethics alarms)  tweeted out the restaurant’s phone number, writing, “Folks should call Mortons [sic] at +1 (202) 955-5997 and tell them it’s gross they welcomed Brett Kavanaugh as a diner tonight. Men who take away women’s  rights should be shunned.”

Justice Kavanaugh left the establishment through a back exit after having his fill of being harassed and as well as causing his fellow diners to be disturbed.  ShutDown DC tweeted: “We hear Kavanaugh snuck out the back with his security detail. @mortons should be ashamed for welcoming a man who so clearly hates women.”

Of course. ‘Our victims should be ashamed.’ The Mark of Asshole!

Morton’s issued the following assessment of the incident:

“Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”

Exactly. This is also a neat and handy ethics test: if one of your friends or relatives doesn’t agree with this basic statement, he or she may be assholes. Or well on their way to becoming one.

But numerous personages and commentators on the Left leaped at the chance to side with the protesters, whose response to Morton’s was to tweet, “No rights for us, no peace for you. Get f–ked @mortons.”

As the chorus would have sung if Disney’s delightful Fifties TV series “Zorro” had been called “Assholes”…

Out of the night, when the full moon is bright
Comes a mob that’s filled with Assholes!
Its justice charade is of fallacies made…
In turn it makes them assholes.
Assholes! They make the sign of the A!
Assholes! If only they’d go away!

Assholes!
Assholes!
Assholes!

I’m sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

Speaking for the White House, and thus President Biden and his party, paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre responded to a question about the incident (from guess who) by babbling, “People have the right, this is what Democracy is. Of course people have a right to privacy but people also have the right to protest peacefully, peacefully, it’s the intimidation and the violence that we condemn.”

Ethics Fool. The right to protest doesn’t make all protests right, and exacting revenge on a SCOTUS justice for doing his job, which is to interpret the law, while disrupting a business and its patrons is dead wrong and indefensible in any ethical system. This “protest” is really intimidation. The threat is clear: if you don’t do what the mob wants, you and your family will never have a moment’s peace. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Major League Baseball

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe it. MLB did something right for a change. I thought I might never see the day.

Today is the announcement of the starters for the 2022 All-Star Game, based on fan voting. The hype is sort of sad, as the game itself, once considered a major sporting event that attracted huge TV ratings, is a bit of a dinosaur thanks to interleague play and the fact that the players make so much money that it isn’t worth it to them to play hard or care about which league’s all-stars win. But never mind: it’ still be far the most entertaining of the various all-star games with by far the richest history.

But I digress. For literally decades I and many others have complained about the repeated situation where one of the game’s greatest players, in his last season, is left off the team because his mid-season statistics are no longer stellar. Thus baseball fans were regularly robbed of the chance to see a guaranteed Hall of Famer one last time in the “Mid-Summer Classic,” despite his status as a career “All-Star.” The game is for the fans, after all, and survives on legends, memories and nostalgia.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: ‘Urgency Is A White Supremacy Value'”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Some people have the rare gift of being able to look at every problem with fresh, unbiased eyes, avoiding the biases, assumptions and conventional wisdom that blinds the rest of us. Ethics Alarms is extremely fortunate to have several regular commentators who fit that description. One of them is Extradimensional Cephalopod.

Here is its Comment of the Day on the post about “urgency” being called a value of white supremacy.

***

In the interests of intellectual integrity and fostering mutual understanding, I must raise the strongest argument I can think of for tardiness. Not tardiness within a culture of punctuality, of course, but tardiness as a culturally accepted habit. Breaking commitments on a whim is never going to be a good idea in a society, because all society relies on trust on some level.

However, a society can exist where everyone knows and accepts that meeting times are suggestions by default and that people will prioritize socialization and relationship-building, however long it takes, over concrete business decisions. By necessity, this would mean that all business decisions would be done more slowly, and logistics would be delayed in responding to any changes. All materials and products would arrive later than in a society with punctual meetings and decisions, so people would wait longer for things they requested. However, they may also have more time to share with those around them. They are not spending that time participating in the proverbial “rat race”.

It’s a tradeoff between swift gratification of material wants and needs versus having more time to spend relaxing with one’s community.

Are there ways of avoiding having to make this tradeoff, to have both more personal time and also more material convenience, and to let people further customize the ratio based on their own individual preferences? Most likely. And yes, those approaches will require committing to mutual expectations, whether those expectations are exacting or flexible.

Continue reading →

Dispirited Ethics Notes That Won’t Make A Ripple Or Change Anything So Why Do I Bother?, 7/8/22

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Beset with self-doubt, anxiety, frustration, despair and futility today. I apologize in advance in case it colors my prose…

1. Again, making the public stupid. I heard a news-reader this morning read directly from a White House press release stating that President Biden was going to announce to the nation that he was signing an executive order “guaranteeing” women’s “reproductive health” and access to abortions. This combination of official deception and journalism negligence is why so many members of the public think the President is a king. Whatever the announcement is, it can’t trump state laws. It can’t make federal law. Those of us who actually pay attention know what this is: pro-abortion activists and Democratic donors told the White House that they are furious that Biden isn’t prominently “fighting” for abortion. This is the result: grandstanding. Continue reading →

Follow-Up: “Observations On A Potential Supreme Court Ethics Scandal…” Yup, It’s Fake News. (Well, Mostly…)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Mark Tapscott is a veteran Washington, D.C. political pro and investigative journalist (who has weighed in at Ethics Alarms a time or two). Late yesterday he focused on clarifying the troubling Rolling Stone story I wrote about here. 

That Rolling Stone piece was headlined, “SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe,” an allegation that fed directly into the pro-abortion trope that the Dobbs decision was substantially motivated by theological fervor rather than legal analysis. In the Ethics Alarms post, I expressed skepticism that the story could be accurate because no mainstream media source had picked it up, and also because any Justices praying with a representative of a religious organization before ruling on a case in which  that organization had submitted a brief would create a neon-bright appearance of impropriety. On the other hand, I found it unlikely that the publication would drop such a “bombshell” without strong evidence, since its news reporting credibility was on lengthy probation after its phantom UVA “gang rape” story fiasco in 2015.

Now the verdict’s in, thanks to Tapscott: Rolling Stone apparently hasn’t learned anything about journalism ethics the last seven years. In a “Culture” column for PJ Media, Tapscott explains: Continue reading →

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

The Liberty Bell rang out on this date in 1776 to announce the Declaration of Independence to Philadelphia (not on the Fourth, like in “1776,” but it was a nice way to end the musical dramatically).

Surely Ethics Alarms readers can find ethics developments of equal import to proclaim today. Well, close, anyway….

The American Public’s Trust In Its Institutions Is Crashing, And The Latest Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal Shows Why

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Gallup has released its annual poll of Americans asking about their trust in 16 major U.S. institutions. You can see the horrible results above. Ethics Alarms has covered this poll for many years, because trust is both a prime ethics value and also the most important one for a democracy. I wrote years ago on the old Ethics Scoreboard about how Democrats were playing with fire by seeding distrust in our elections and the Supreme Court by hammering on the too-close 2000 Presidential election as a “stolen” while claiming the Gore “won.” I called the strategy “pulling at the fabric of democracy,” if I recall, noting that our system uniquely requires public trust in our processes, institutions, leaders and fellow members of the public. Since then, the level of distrust has both fallen and widened.

Even applying the obligatory distrust of polls themselves, Gallup’s conclusions are frightening, in part because they feel accurate. Not only is the public less confident in major U.S. institutions than it was a year ago, it is the worst it has been across the board since Gallup started checking. There were significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The Supreme Court fell lower than it ever has been, not surprising since two of the institutions regarded correctly as less trustworthy have been cynically and irresponsibly deriding it for purely ideological motives. The Presidency has dropped in trust even more than SCOTUS, which shows that the public is paying attention. Congress hasn’t fallen as far in percentage points, but only because it had fallen so far already. The five points it lost in trust almost cuts its previous low in half.

Thus it is not, perhaps, coincidental that less than two weeks ago,the Presidency and the news media were further exposed by the discovery of a 2018 voicemail from President Biden that proved his repeated denials about speaking with crooked Number Two Son Hunter Biden about his foreign business dealings were outright lies.

Continue reading →

Observations On A Potential Supreme Court Ethics Scandal That I Have No Idea What To Make Of…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

What’s going on here? I wish I knew.

Rolling Stone has reported that during an evangelical victory celebration in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the Dobbs decision,  Capitol Hill religious leader Peggy Nienaber got herself recorded saying that  she has prayed with sitting justices inside the SCOTUS building. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber boasted. Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. Liberty Counsel frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court, and filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

Rolling Stone says,

Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.” But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.

Yikes. Continue reading →

Next Up In The Desperate Push To Rationalize Abortion: Attacking Adoption

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The couple above and their sign outside the Supreme Court building triggered a series of telling attacks on the option of abortion after a photo of them was tweeted and went “viral.” Mark Hamill, the “Star Wars” star who has supported himself of late by being the voice of “The Joker” in animated “Batman” features, led the way with this incoherent but snarky tweet:

Attacks on adoption and those advocating it as a non-homicidal alternative to abortion are one more manifestation of how the Dobbs decision has unmasked so many of the pro-abortion progressives who had been hiding behind the deceitful “choice” trope. Now we are hearing advocacy for up-to-the-moment-of-birth abortions, and rationalizations for the procedure ranging from economic benefits to the economy and avoidance of disruptions to women’s ambitions, to arguments that children in poverty, with health problems or in unstable families are better off if they never draw a breath. This long-delayed candor will be, in the long run, a beneficial development. Finally abortion ethics can be debated acknowledging the unethical priorities and values that have been used to sanctify it for so long.

I see now that he attack on adoption was inevitable. Examine these recent abortion advocacy pieces: “Conservatives love to paint adoption as the solution to abortion. Adoptees aren’t buying it,” and “The Insidious Idiocy of ‘We Will Adopt Your Baby’ Memes.”

Continue reading →