At halftime in the Brigham Young University (BYU) and Stanford University’s (Stanford) football game in California, Stanford’s band devoted its halftime show to insulting the Mormon faith The skit was called “Gay Chicken,” and featured a mock wedding ceremony of two women,using the words of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marriage ceremony that declares a man and woman united “for time and all eternity.” In the skit, the wedding officiant quoted Genesis 1:28 and directed both women to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
Gee, that sounds so hilarious I can’t imagine why the many Mormons in the crowd would feel attacked! They should have been laughing their heads off! Well, some people just have no sense of humor….
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Time’s advice column ethicist who really is an ethicist, was atsked with this query from “Name Withheld”:
I am a Black woman and I signed up as a mentor for a law-student-mentoring program at my alma mater. I made a request for a Black mentee, but I was paired with a white woman. Now I’m second-guessing participating in the program. Black attorneys make up less than 5 percent of all attorneys and continue to face horrific experiences in law school and in the legal community.
This is whom I envisioned myself supporting when I registered for the program as a recent graduate. I imagined deep conversations about law professors and law-firm culture, and sharing how I’ve learned to navigate them as a Black woman. Not only will these conversations not apply to my mentee the same way, but I can’t help wondering if assisting them will ultimately contribute to my own oppression.
There are so many factors in her favor that I don’t really want to help give her even more of a leg up in my free time. On the other hand, I don’t have anything against her, and law school is universally scary during the first year. Should I be thinking about this differently? Is it wrong to bow out?
The combination of The Great Stupid washing over the land, woke indoctrination and bullying, and the politicization of everything has perhaps taken its greatest toll on the trustworthiness of the professions. One after another has succumbed to ethics rot to an extent that one would have been unimaginable. The legal profession has been especially ravaged.
A depressing and horrifying op-ed in the Wall Street Journal told the first-hand account of how the writer was fired from her law firm, Hogan Lovells, for daring to express an opinion that was not deemed compliant with current progressive cant. She wrote in part,
After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, global law firm Hogan Lovells organized an online conference call for female employees. As a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a “safe space” for women at the firm to discuss the decision. It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me.
Everyone else who spoke on the call was unanimous in her anger and outrage about Dobbs. I spoke up to offer a different view. I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies. I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide. I said I thought this was tragic.
The outrage was immediate. The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the same, I hung up.
Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that day, Hogan Lovells suspended my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an investigation. The firm also released a statement to the legal website Above the Law bemoaning the devastating impact my views had on participants in the forum—most of whom were lawyers participating in a call convened expressly for the purpose of discussing a controversial legal and political topic. Someone leaked my name to the press.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto—how I miss his blog!— famously wrote of accusations that something was a “racist dog whistle”:
“The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.”
Bingo. In the last week we have seen two particularly vivid examples of this phenomenon. The most recent is peak Great Stupid: the World Health Organization announced that it will begin referring to monkeypox as “mpox.” Why? Well, there were complaints that its name constituted “racist and stigmatizing language.” Yes, all it takes to make WHO jump is complaints from morons, or perhaps power-seeking activists who want to see how easily they can bend organizations to their will, just to prove they can. Continue reading →
I was going to include poor Alyssa’s tweet in a post under construction about the Elon Musk Twitter take-over freakout, but this is so special it deserves special attention. The former child-star turned full-time social media-obsessed Hollywood has-been embarrassment really outdid herself this time. She added even more evidence to the already air-tight case that progressives, the Hollywood left and mainstream media regarded Twitter as their own propaganda organ and a crucial tool in censoring opposing views while indoctrinating the public to achieve their partisan goals. She again illustrated the truism that celebrities typically have little of value to contribute to public policy discourse. When one is biased, ignorant and ill-informed, it is best not to widely distribute your incompetent and irresponsible analysis of current affairs.
Last week Donald Trump had dinner at Mar-a-Largo with Kanye West—I’ll start calling him by his new name, Ye, once I’m convinced that it’s not just another gimmick, or in other words, “never”—as well as Nick Fuentes, a 24-year-old leader of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference, and Karen Giorno, a veteran political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Never in my memory has the identity of dinner companions ever been used by the media as a supposed smoking gun against the dinner’s host. West, you may recall, had a much publicized meeting with Trump when he was President; he has recently been “cancelled” for making what seemed like anti-Semitic comments. (Kanye, it is fair to say, is mentally unstable and a publicity addict, and is likely to say anything at any time.) Fuentes dining with Trump, however, has been the focus of most of the criticism from the media, political figures, and others. The Times’ house anti-Trump specialist, Maggie Haberman wrote,
Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.
She (and her co-reporter Alan Feuer) also quoted several figures who condemned Trump’s guest list:
“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump’s longtime bankruptcy lawyer and then his appointee as ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”
“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.
“Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said, ‘We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.’”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Fuentes, [saying], “Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country…He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties here, including the R.J.C….[that Trump ]“or any serious contender for higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and spending time is appalling. And really, you can’t say that you oppose hate and break bread with haters. It’s that simple.”
On July 5, 2005 in Kirkwood, Missouri, police were executing a search warrant. While they were in his home, twelve-year old Joseph Long suffered a seizure and collapsed. Police, maybe thinking he was faking, maybe worrying about being distracted from their jobs, maybe because they were just cold-hearted bastards, did nothing to help him, and wouldn’t let his mother intervene either. The child died. Two hours later, the same officers responded to the same neighborhood after getting reports of illegal fireworks being set off. Kevin Johnson, the dead child’s older brother, spotted officer William McEntee, one of the police who had been at his home earlier that evening. “You killed my brother,” he said, and fired a gun at the officer multiple times, killing him.
Johnson was tried, sentenced to death, and now, 17 years later, has run out of appeals. He’s going to be executed. His daughter, Korry, just two when he murdered the police officer, is now 19 and wants to be among the limited number of attendees at her father’s death. Missouri has a statute, Revised Code Section 546.740 that determines who is eligible to watch an execution: Continue reading →
Thanksgiving is an ethics holiday, almost as much an ethics holiday as Christmas. The United States is a nation founded on ethical idealism, so it figures that that increasingly vile and relentless defilers of the nation, who have multiplied like bacteria in agar for a wealth of reasons, attack both holidays with as much gusto as they attack the U.S. year ’round. Here’s the reliably disgusting Joy Reid on Thanksgiving: in a typical Reid rant, she said it is…
….important to unpack the myth of Thanksgiving. It is a holiday riddled with historical inaccuracies.
Built on this myth that the indigenous welcomed their colonizers with open arms and ears of corn. A simplistic fairy tale interpretation of a 1621 encounter between indigenous tribes and English settlers that erases the genocide that followed. It’s the truth that Republicans want banned from our textbooks because here is the secret they want so desperately to keep.
We are a country founded on violence. Our birth was violent. In 1619, a ship with more than 20 enslaved Africans landed in Virginia, ushering in two centuries of American slavery that left millions in chains or dead. With those humans in bondage were finally free, a terrorist organization that was a card carrying member of polite society, Ku Klux Klan, picked up where the Civil War ended, using violence to maintain white supremacy. The Klan is still active and as Americans, we continue to choose violence. We are a country that chooses violence over and over again. There is no facet of the mark in society untouched by it.
Typical of Reid, she engages in an orgy of historical misinformation, to use the Left’s favorite word of late, to claim that Thanksgiving is “riddled with historical inaccuracies.” Holidays are not about technical accuracy, but tradition and symbolism. Deconstructing any holiday is a breeze; all one has to do is focus on related events and facts that the are not the reason the holiday exists. Let’s talk about Martin Luther King, Joy! Continue reading →
The public defenders for Anderson Lee Aldrich, the alleged perpetrator of the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub, said in a court filing obtained by a New York Times reporter that their client is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.
Is it fair to say these revelations suggest that the rush to blame “anti-LGBTQ” rhetoric—you know, like ” we really shouldn’t allow people with penises to throttle biological women in competitive sports” and “drag queens are not appropriate library story-tellers for children,”hateful stuff like that—for the tragedy was a tad premature? Reckless even? Cynically exploitative, mayhap?
Why yes, I think it is fair.
Over at CNN, so crushed were the talking heads by the revelation that their usual conservative villification campaign would have to be more creative that they engaged in this desperate analysis:
ALISYN CAMEROTA: So, attorneys for the accused shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, say in new court filings tonight that the suspect now identifies as non binary. …They use they/them pronouns. And for the purposes of all formal filings will be addressed as Mx Aldrich….Joining me now CNN political commentator Errol Lewis, also back with me Al Franken and Joe Walsh. I don’t know what to say about that. I mean that’s not anything that we had heard from his background. People had been looking into his background, and I don’t know if anybody here–are you guys lawyers? I mean, you know, I don’t know what to say about that. That’s what he’s now saying.
ERROL LEWIS: It sounds like they’re trying to prepare a defense against a hate crimes charge. That’s the least of his problems, legally speaking. But it looks like they’re trying to build some kind of sympathy or at least confusion on the question of whether or not this was purely motivated by hate.
CAMEROTA: That is what it sounds like. We will wait to see.
“That is what it sounds like”? If you are an idiot, I guess: the “hate crime” enhancement is hardly a major concern when one has killed five and wounded 18. {Not to beat a dead horse, but Lewis’s statement perfectly embodies the utter stupidity of the “hate crime” blot on our criminal justice system. Sure, Errol, he might have shot all of those people out of mild pique.]
You have to hand it to the San Francisco Elections Commission. It was open, transparent and honest, and presented its compensatory racism without shame or obfuscation. This is, however, because in the Bizarro culture of San Francisco, “good” discrimination because of race and gender is nothing to be ashamed of. From the moment that “diversity-equity-inclusion became the latest woke buzz term, this episode was inevitable. The question, after the heads of all rational Americans stop exploding like Krakatoa, is “Now what?”
San Francisco Department of Elections director John Arntz has run the elections for the county and the city for 20 years. The San Francisco Elections Commission praised Arntz for his “incredible leadership,” but voted 4-2 not to renew his contract. Though all twelve election directors signed a letter requesting that Arntz be reappointed, he is now out of a job. Election commissioners were clear that their decision to dismiss him had nothing to do with inadequacies in his effectiveness in performing his duties, but, it was explained, there are more important things than being good at your job.
Ethics Alarms 