If the name Henry Bergh rings an ethics bell, you’re better informed than I, or have a better memory. I dimly recall having read the name, but only today, checking for ethics landmarks on the date, did I realize his significance.

Bergh was the diplomat and philanthropist who, on this date in 1866, founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In a New York City speech following a trip to Europe where he had been horrified by the treatment of work horses, he appealed to human compassion for “these mute servants of mankind” and argued that protecting animals was should not face any class or partisan disagreements. “This is a matter purely of conscience; it has no perplexing side issues,” he said. “It is a moral question in all its aspects.” Bergh then introduced his “Declaration of the Rights of Animals.”

Soon after, the New York State legislature passed a charter incorporating the ASPCA, the first animal cruelty law in the United States was passed, authorizing the ASPCA to investigate complaints of animal cruelty and to make arrests. Bergh, meanwhile, was frequently ridiculed for his passion, as in the cartoon above that was accompanied by an article calling him a “traitor to his species.”

Morons. To the contrary, Bergh’s personal rescues of mistreated horses and livestock inspired activists and social reformers taking up the cause of abused children. In 1874, they founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Henry Bergh served as one of the group’s first vice presidents.

1. I’m tempted to post this one from yesterday again...Maybe it was Easter’s fault, but The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Jumps The Rails In Tennessee attracted far fewer comments than the silly tale of Bud Light thinking a ridiculous trans “influencer” was a perfect choice to be a beer spokesperson. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is barfing up op-eds about how Tennessee Republicans punishing three Democratic legislators for helping a mob shut down the work of the legislature in order to demand that “something” be done about gun violence shows that Republicans are hostile to democracy. What head exploding hypocrisy! I wrote,

The behavior of the three (Democratic, of course) state reps was indefensible. No one has explained why Republican members of Congress who supported the January 6 protest against what many believed was a rigged election were threatened by Democrats with a Constitutional ban from running for office as punishment, but the Tennessee legislators who actually participated in disrupting the government were pronounced by the same news media and party that condemned the Republicans as heroes. This is because it can’t be explained: it’s mind-blowing hypocrisy and a flaming double standard. What the Tennessee Democrats did was clearly worse: no Republicans too part in the January 6 attack on the Capital? No riot in Nashville, you say? That’s because, and only because, of moral luck. Police did not try to force the Nashville demonstrators to leave and didn’t have the numbers to even try. The anti-gun protesters, as you might expect, did not have a contingent of wackos prone to violence, though they might have. The news media’s near unanimous position is that people disrupting a Republican-run legislature in the midst of doing government business is admirable, but disrupting a Democratic-run Congress is an “insurrection.”

This time, I beat Professor Turley by almost a full day, who wrote last night,

The three members yelled “No action, no peace” and “Power to the people” as their colleagues objected to their stopping the legislative process. Undeterred, the three refused to allow “business as usual” to continue. Nothing says deliberative debate like a bullhorn. American politics, it seems, has become a matter of simple amplification. Many on the left lionized the three for their disruption of the legislature. President Biden denounced the sanctioning of their “peaceful protest” as “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.” There was little criticism of the members for obstructing the legislative business or refusing to accept the democratic process that rejected their gun-control demands. Today, for many, there is no room for nuance. Instead, they live in a world occupied only by “fascists” and “insurrectionists.”…This is now our “historic reality.” Liberals and the media, long criticized for downplaying violence from the left, are now rationalizing a disruption of legislative procedure as “good trouble” because the cause is considered to be correct.

2. Speaking of unethical Federal judges, since debating the blatantly unethical conduct of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas dominated much of Ethics Alarms’ time and space over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas issued a power-abusing decision that made the entire judicial branch look bad, cancelling the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first drug approved for an abortion pill, 23 years after it was first approved. This is the first time in history that a court has asserted the power to pull a drug from the market after FDA approval, and it is an abuse of power at that. Kacsmaryk is a passionate abortion opponent, but that does not allow him to decide based on anti-abortion activist assertions that a drug is unsafe and that the FDA is less qualified to declare a drug safe than he is. Within an hour of its release, his ruling started a constitutional crisis when a federal judge in Washington issued an injunction ordering the FDA to allow mifepristone in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

This isn’t an ethical issue regarding abortion. The ethics issue is abuse of power and process—again, as in the previous story, an ideological claim that laws, rules and ethical principles can be ignored to make “good trouble” in Prof. Turley’s term.

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There are three matters I intended to include in Part I, but somehow failed:

1. Thomas’s wife, the hard right activist Ginni, is more of a toxic influence on Clarence that I had thought or hoped. It still doesn’t justify the Justice being accused of a conflict: as a society we simply cannot embrace the idea that husbands are responsible for the activities of their wives or vice-versa. However, Ginni’s fingerprints seem all over this mess.

2. To be clear: assuming Thomas was legally obligated to report the benefits of the vacations that did not meet the statuary exceptions for hospitality, that would not be legitimate reason to remove him. Far more serious, and in my view why he should resign, is whom he took the vacations with, as well as who paid for them. Those details are what raise the appearance of impropriety, and it is that, not the technical failure to report, that makes his conduct unforgivable in a Supreme Court Justice.

3. When the next Gallup poll regarding public trust in institutions and professions rolls around this winter, and SCOTUS, once the branch of the government held in the highest regard by the public, again sinks, Thomas will be a major reason. And if I am polled, I will vote with the disillusioned.

Now on to the rationalizations. Not only have I been dismayed at how many pundits, conservative commentators an Ethics Alarms readers have rushed to defend Justice Thomas when there really is no defense for his conduct, but it is also disturbing that none of these have produced an argument that isn’t transparently contrived. The following rationalizations on the Ethics Alarms list seem to encompass the entire thrust of the “Thomas shouldn’t resign” briefs. How depressing. Here they are, with some brief comments:

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That’s a photo from the popular Canadian TV series “Slasher: Ripper,” which just began its 5th season. The actor is Gabriel Darku who, as you can see, is a black performer, but for some reason is playing a rising Toronto police detective in an integrated police department in the late 19th Century. There were no rising black police detectives in the late 19th Century, and certainly not with that hair-style. Even more remarkable is another character in the series, a black, female surgeon and medical examiner.

Of course, the race issue never comes up in conversation: race doesn’t exist, apparently. The show, like so many others, is set in a universe where racial bias, caste systems and discrimination doesn’t exist. I’m only picking on “Slasher: Ripper” because I happened upon it last night (the show also has a “non-binary” female in male garb character whom everyone treats as no different from anyone else). There are a lot of period shows that engage in this fantasy. Another is Netflix’s “Enola Holmes.”

Let me say without hesitation: I don’t care. I know this is all part of the effort to make more acting opportunities for minority actors (and fewer for white actors) in pursuit of fairness, diversity, and inclusion, yada yada. OK: as always, my position as a a critic, director and ethicist is that as long as such non-traditional casting works, and doesn’t diminish the entertainment value or become a distraction to most audience members, go crazy, man! I don’t find Darku so extraordinary an actor that his ahistorical casting seems justifiable in artistic terms—I find him rather wooden and boring—but that’s just me. However…

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