Childhood and children

SCOTUS Approves State Tuition Aid For Students To Attend Religious Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

People gather outside the Supreme Court building as the court hears oral arguments in the Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue case in Washington, U.S., January 22, 2020. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger.

This opinion just came down, and I haven’t had an opportunity to read it, and probably won’t until tomorrow.  In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the justices held that the application of the Montana Constitution’s “no-aid” provision to a state program providing tuition assistance to parents who send their children to private schools discriminated against religious schools and the families whose children attend or hope to attend them, in violation of the free exercise clause.  This was a straight conservatives vs. liberals majority, and Chief Justice Roberts, much maligned of late, wrote the majority opinion. The Washington Post  reports,

Chief Justice John G. Roberts …said the Montana Supreme Court was wrong to strike down the program because of a provision in the state constitution that forbids public funds from going to religious institutions. The U.S. Constitution’s protection of religious freedom prevails, he said.

“A state need not subsidize private education,” Roberts wrote. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.

Again, I haven’t read the legal arguments, but the ethical justification for the opinion is clear. If public schools could be trusted not to indoctrinate students with political view and social positions that their parents might oppose, the urgency of the state providing affordable alternatives would be far less. However, alert and involved parents realize, or should, that by sending students to public schools, they are too often subjecting them to partisan and ideological brain-washing, and we are seeing the results in the streets as I write this. There need to be alternatives other than home-schooling. The ethics principles here are fairness, respect, and autonomy. Continue reading →

Ethics Grab Bag: 6/18/20: Absolutism, DACA, Cancel Culture And Pancakes

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

1. Oh, I’m sure that will help a lot. Quaker announced yesterday that the Aunt Jemima brand would be rebranded and renamed “to make progress toward racial equality.” Yeah, I’m sure the pancake box design and hearing that demon name “Jemima” has retarded the progress of racial justice for decades.  I couldn’t care less what pancake mix is called and I doubt that anyone else does, but  if any portion of the market claims to find the logo offensive, that’s a good reason to ditch it, which I assume means that Uncle Ben’s Rice will be called “U.B.R.” soon. Nonetheless, Quaker’s move isn’t substantive. It’s virtue signaling, and at this point, more historical airbrushing. Getting rid of Aunt Jemima will cost Quaker millions of dollars, and probably raise the price of the product. It won’t affect racial equality one iota.

Meanwhile, cultural context and history is lost. The R. T. Davis Milling Company hired former slave Nancy Green as a spokesperson for the Aunt Jemima pancake mix in 1890, and she continued in that role  until her death in 1923. Green appeared as Jemima beside the “world’s largest flour barrel” while operating a pancake-cooking display at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. After the Expo, Green was given a lifetime contract to  promote the pancake mix. Aunt Jemima was Nancy Green’s one link to immortality.

2. Today’s SCOTUS decision on DACA. Here’s how NPR put it: “A narrowly divided U.S. Supreme Court extended a life-support line to some 650,000 so-called DREAMers on Thursday, allowing them to remain safe from deportation for now, while the Trump administration jumps through the administrative hoops that the court said are required before ending the program.”

The President called this a political decision in his inimitable, meat-axe way:

This is an especially stupid tweet. Every time SCOTUS doesn’t back the administration isn’t a political decision, and lumping apples and kumquats together, which is what generalizing about decisions as diverse as the gay discrimination decision and this one is, just shows that the President doesn’t read the opinions he’s complaining about, and only cares about the results. (Of course, in this he is like most Americans, sad to say.)

After wading through as much of the assorted opinions in the case as I can stand (Great thanks, once again, to valkygrrl for sending me the link), I think that’s unfair.

Chief Justice Roberts, again the swing man, joined with the four liberal Justices and authored the majority opinion. This sentence says it all: “The dispute before the Court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may. The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so.” That means that the decision isn’t about substance or policy, but rather process. Process decisions are not, or shouldn’t be, political. This note also undermines the idea that the Justices were just acting in partisan lockstep:

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV. GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined that opinion in full, and SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to all but Part IV. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part anddissenting in part, in which ALITO and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed opinions concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.

If the President paid attention, he would see that a majority of the Court found that his actions regarding DACA were not motivated by “animus,” thus denying Big Lie #4.

I am unalterably opposed to DACA, for reasons stated frequently here. The short version: it is incompetent and irresponsible law-making to provide an incentive for people to break the law. DACA is fueled by emotion and sentimentality (“Think if the children!”) and is an incremental step toward open borders. However, other than some dicta among the concurrences and dissents, there is no reason to see the decision as either favoring or disfavoring the law. Continue reading →

Mid-Friday Ethics, 6/12/2020: The Fame Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Good afternoon!

1. On Fame. One of my pet peeves is the pursuit of fame as a life objective. It is inherently unethical, because fame itself is unrelated to good or evil; it is a neutral value, and its pursuit is pure self-interest mixed with ignorance.

First, as too many celebrities to count have informed us, fame is at least as much of a burden as a boon, and second, there is no such thing as “immortality” through fame. As Shelley wrote,

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

The lyrics of the theme song from the movie and TV series “Fame” so annoyed me that I refused to view either:

Remember my name, fame
I’m gonna live forever
I’m gonna learn how to fly, high

I feel it comin’ together
People will see me and cry, fame
I’m gonna make it to heaven
Light up the sky like a flame, fame
I’m gonna live forever
Baby, remember my name!

Yeah, good luck with that life plan. Who remembers Irene Cara, the star of the film who sang the song? If you enter the field of performing, or any field, to become famous rather than to contribute something of value to society, you’re an asshole.

Chasing it is a fool’s pursuit, but sometimes fame finds you. I just read that former MLB baseball player Claudell Washington died. I remember him, but few do: he arrived heralded as a future superstar, but never reached that status. He is famous, however, because a foul ball he hit in a game of no importance is “immortalized” in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a cult classic, as the ball Ferris (Matthew Broderick) catches in the stands while playing hookie.

It’s more immortality than most of us get. Continue reading →

Naming Ethics: The Gaylord Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

My short summary of this ethics controversy is: This mother is nuts.

A woman, 24, is due to have her first child in August, and, she says,  the first born son of everyone from her side of the family has been named Gaylord since the early 19th Century. She is determined to carry on the  tradition, though her husband is horrified, maintaining that to name any boy “Gaylord” is child abuse.

That’s probably overstating it, but just a bit. Gaylord is not a common name (it’s from the Old French gaillard meaning “joyful” or “high-spirited”), but Wikipedia lists 25 famous or accomplished Gaylords, only one of which I had ever heard of, the baseball player on the list (of course). That’s Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry, who won over 300 games during a 21 year career in which he was famous for throwing spitballs, an illegal pitch.  Perry is one of the three Gaylords on the list who is still alive, including a French long-distance runner named Gaylord Silly.

Now that’s child abuse..

But I digress. The mother says she offered her husband a compromise, agreeing that young Gaylord would go by “Gail” in school “so that he doesn’t have to deal with bullies.”

What? Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Back To The 13th Question: Answer It, Stop Grandstanding, Or Shut Up”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Frequent  commenter of distinction Ryan Harkins doesn’t exactly try to answer the”13th Question” ( “What is the “systemic reform regarding race in America” that the George Floyd protests purport to be seeking?”), but at least he advances the discussion by trying to define the problem, which is a whole lot more than anything we have heard from media pundits and elected officials over the last week, and they have fallen all over themselves trying be seen as allying with the right “side.”

This seems like a propitious place to raise this article from Foreign Affairs that readers Wesley49 has proposed for discussion. “I would love to hear the opinions and insights from this thread’s contributors in trying to answer your 13th Question,” he wrote. I have a lot of problems with the piece, which typifies, I think, the academic/scholarly equivocation around this issue, but I won’t pre-bias the discussion more than that.

Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day —which has the added pleasure of some great quotes—on the post, “Back To The 13th Question: Answer It, Stop Grandstanding, Or Shut Up”:

The problem with trying to end racism is that it runs aground the basic human impulse to “other” people who are different. It has been a practice of mankind from the beginning, and even our very best of societies will constantly struggle with the temptation to “other” the people who at the very least aren’t playing along.

“Othering” is to make someone an outcast from the group, and to place blame on them for the groups problems. Theologians have referred to it as scapegoating. If someone looks different, dresses different, acts different, talks different, there will be the temptation to mock that person, ostracize that person, and perhaps even blame that person for everything that is going wrong. Then, if you can destroy that person, then magically all the problems will go away.

“You want to know what’s wrong with this nation? It’s those damned Republicans trying to horde all the wealth.” “You want to know what’s wrong with this nation? It’s those damned Democrats who are trying socialize everything.” “You want to know what’s wrong with this nation? It’s all those hateful religious folk.” “… It’s all those LGBT people destroying family values.” “…It’s all those white supremacists trying to suppress minorities.” “…It’s all those anti-vaxers…” “…It’s those climate change deniers…” “…It’s those power hungry people who treat science like a religion…” Continue reading →

Comments Of The Day: Ethics Dispatches From The Sick Ward, 5/26/2020: Arg! Yechh! [#1]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It took a while, but my complaint about the advertising world’s bizarre decision to make pirates the sole politically correct genre for innocent childsplay finally generated the intriguing commentary I hoped it would.

Here are two Comments of the Day on the topic, breached in Item #1 of the post, “Ethics Dispatches From The Sick Ward, 5/26/2020: Arg! Yechh!”

First up, Isaac:

Permit me a midnight rant about pirates.

Kids did not play pirates at any time before this Gen-Xer was born. Kids played sailors or soldiers, and the PIRATES WERE THE BAD GUYS. That is because pirates were (and are) indeed very bad guys.

Treasure Island is a realistic story about stuffy British Christian men (and a boy) defeating a gang of vile, godless pirates. Once the story gets going there are exactly zero female characters. I can see why the destroyers of culture who lord it over modern schools would find this “problematic.” But it just might be my all-time favorite book. Pirates are interesting, fascinating, and make for good stories. BUT THEY AREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THE HEROES.

Even the least-murderous of real-life pirates still tricked innocent merchant vessels and robbed them by force. They still were known for spending their free time raping, drinking themselves to death, and spreading venereal disease. Within just the last few years, pirates off the coast of Somalia have been murdering entire ships’ crews, so it’s not as if there’s no modern frame of reference for understanding why they generally shouldn’t be cast as heroes, as you mentioned.

There was a funny but sad incident not too long ago told by a mom who had been to Disneyland. She took her son into a boutique in the park that styles up girls into princesses. They offered to do their equivalent service for the young man by making him into a pirate. The small child, who had more common sense and moral awareness than the entire Disney corporation, pointed out that pirates are bad guys, and insisted that he wanted to be a prince instead. There were no prince costumes.

There are now SEVERAL kids’ cartoons in which kids “play pirate,” mostly thanks to the Disney movie. One of them is “Jake and the Neverland pirates” which doesn’t even make any sense in the context of Peter Pan. A character on this show said to his tiny audience, at one point, and I quote, verbatim, “A good pirate never takes anyone else’s property.” And they were serious.

The elephant is there in the room from that very first film. Jack Sparrow proves himself to be “a good man” and the moral (such as it is) is that even a pirate can be good. And so, at the end of the film, “good man” Jack gets his ship and crew back and sails off into the sunset too…do what, exactly? Sail the world looking for beached whales to rescue? Hunt for lost treasure to return it to its rightful owner? The next several movies twist themselves into knots to avoid having to give the obvious answer to this question: the only way to be a pirate is to, you know, commit piracy. It’s right there in the name.

I wonder if 50 years or so would be sufficient time for Disney to train kids to “play terrorist.” Just make a wacky movie about an eccentric jihadist who turns out to have a heart of gold.

Now here’s Pirate Comment of the Day #2, from Jeff: Continue reading →

Sympathy For The Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have a problem of long-standing: I just can’t muster a lot of empathy for people who hurt themselves doing incredibly stupid things. I just can’t. Stupidity causes so much death and destruction in the world, and the more competent among us spend so much precious time and treasure trying to mitigate the damage wreaked on society by idiots.

Even when the idiots involved are children, I have difficultly time feeling too sorry for their self-inflicted misfortunes if the cause was sufficiently dunder-headed…like in this case.

In Bolivia, three Marvel Comics-loving brothers, ages 12, 10 and 8, forced a black widow spider to bite them, theorizing that the bites would turn each of them into Spiderman. First of all, if you are going to try something like this, know your comics. Peter Parker wasn’t bitten by a Black Widow—where did they get that idea? —which has venom 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake’s bite. Black widows are one of the most feared spiders in the world, and the most venomous in North America. Now, Spiderman got his Spidey powers after being bitten by an ordinary spider that was radioactive. If the brothers were such fans of the Webslinger, they should have known that. If you aren’t sure what kind of spider confers super-powers, you don’t take a flyer on the deadliest spider around as your first candidate.

Yeah yeah yeah they are just kids. So were the idiots who jumped off of roofs using a blankets as capes when The Superman TV show was hot. I didn’t have any sympathy for them, either.

Finding the  brothers crying in pain, their mother rushed them to a nearby health center, which transferred them to a nearby hospital suffering from fevers, tremors and muscle pains. They were treated and discharged  almost a week after they were bitten. They were lucky. They may not be so lucky next time.

 

Zoom Ethics: A Shocking Home vs Workplace Conflict

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

…and, in my opinion, a really, really, stupid one.

I’d say that this story should be in online glossaries to describe “pearl-clutching.” Also “virtue-signaling.”

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports that Brian Akers, president of the Charter Oak Unified School Board in Covina, California, drank beer out of a bottle during a Zoom video board meeting last week, and everyone is FREAKING OUT!!! 

The video conference platform allows people to have  in-person meetings from their homes. People drink beer in their homes. They do it while talking on the phone, or messaging on Facebook. So, after finishing dinner and logging into the meeting, Akers took a few sips from the already opened bottle of beer without giving it a thought.

School board members were offended and aghast, apparently under the impression that it’s 1929.  Akers, they said, violated the board’s alcohol and drug-free workplace policy. “This is an isolated and unfortunate incident that was quickly addressed by members of our governing board, once it was brought to our attention,” board Vice President Gregg Peterson said in a statement. “As elected officials, we need to be transparent and hold ourselves accountable for our actions.” They “addressed” it by reprimanding Akers.

After all, he had to be held accountable……for engaging in a completely legal and normal act in his own home that harmed no one, that every single member of the school board has done themselves, probably countless times, and that everyone knows they have done it. Never mind: Greg Palatto, a psychologist and executive board member of the Charter Oak Educators Association said he was “taken aback,” and was in such shock that he couldn’t even process what he had seen.

“No way could that have been a beer, maybe a root beer.” he told reporters. “Then we look back on the live and yup, that’s a Pacifico!”

OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!

NOT A PACIFICO!!!!!!!!

Palatto declared that Akers’ having a beer on camera sets a bad example for students, some of whom watch school board meeting videos for civics classes. “Kids are watching us,” Palatto said. And, as we all know, no kids have any idea that adults drink beer.

Some parents, like John Sitz,  who has three children who graduated from district schools, said that Akers should resign. “I would like to see him resign due to the fact that if it was anybody else caught drinking on the job, you would be walked off the premises at that point in time,” said Sitz. Walked out of his own home, you idiot? When unique circumstances force people to turn over their privacy and homes to employers, some reasonable leeway is called for, not rabid intolerance and hyperventilating over nothing, and a single swig of beer is nothing.

“I’ll apologize to anyone. It wasn’t intentional,” Akers said, descending into full grovel.

He should not apologize. He should tell his grandstanding colleagues to apologize to him. He should say, “Yup, I drank a beer during the meeting. I often drink beers at home, and I was home. I didn’t think about it, in part because I foolishly thought my colleagues on the board had common sense and a modicum of proportion and fairness. I was wrong. They don’t. They can have my resignation if they want it, but they won’t get an apology, because I did nothing wrong. Now I’m going to have another beer.”

But hey, I might be wrong. Let’s see what a poll shows…

Censorship “For The Greater Good” Loses A Round In Massachusetts

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Good.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts (that’s like the state Supreme Court in a normal state) held that free speech rights were wrongly infringed upon by a lower court’s non-disparagement order forbidding the husband or wife from posting about their divorce on Facebook and other social media sites until their child turned 14. The child at issue was a toddler when the ruling was handed down.

It is disturbing to me that judges lack sufficiently Americanized ethics alarms to squelch the temptation to issue rulings like the one overturned.  Sure, kids are harmed by their parents saying terrible things about each other, but there is nothing special about such communications on social  media. Parents harm their kids by screaming at each other in the kitchen. That’s life.

“We conclude that the nondisparagement orders at issue here operate as an impermissible prior restraint on speech,” the Supreme Judicial Court ruled. Though the  judge “put careful thought into his orders in an effort to protect a child caught in the middle of a legal dispute who was unable to advocate for himself… there was no showing of an exceptional circumstance that would justify the imposition of a prior restraint, the nondisparagement orders issued here are unconstitutional.”

 Two Norfolk Probate and Family Court judges issued the original bans when the ugly divorce between Ronnie Shak and his former wife, Masha  Shak, who shared one son born in 2017, spread to social media.
 Continue reading →

Evening Ethics, 5/5/2020: Women And Hypocrites [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Sit a spell, Take your shoes off.

1. What does this tell you, Elie? Come on, I know you can figure it out...Elie Mystal, the emotional lawyer turned social justice warrior who used to embarrass “Above the Law” with his unhinged rants (like the time he announced that no black juror should ever vote to convict a black defendant regardless of the evidence) finally ended up where he belonged all along, the far-left Communist-flirting The Nation. He just issued a post that raises a legitimate issue, despite a typical Nation headline ( “The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care”).

Closing the schools does indeed make it impossible for many Americans to go to work; this was obvious (wasn’t it?) as soon as schools started closing due to the Wuhan virus. His most useful observation: how are we going to send people back to work without addressing the school problem, and doesn’t that have to be addressed in order to open up the economy? Ellie, who is being  Daddy-child care in the division of duties in his family (good for him) writes in part,

As of this writing, 43 states have closed schools through the end of the academic year. …For most families, there is no child care without school. In America, school is pretty much the only free or subsidized child care our government provides. Without reliable, affordable, and Covid-free child care, going back to work is simply not an option for many parents. The school closings only deepen a reoccurring problem most parents face: the summer. In a society that has decided to outsource child care responsibilities to the school system, the fact that this system goes on an annual months-long holiday is already a nightmare for working parents.

After that, Ellie being Ellie and The Nation being The Nation, we get indictments of unfeeling male policy-makers (“I bet if we elected more women, the order of operations for reopening the economy wouldn’t be so ass-backwards”—Did you check how many states with female governors shut down the schools, Elie? I didn’t think so) and, of course, a call for more subsidized child care, because it takes a village to raise a child and because you never let a crisis go to waste.

I bet, if he thinks real hard, Elie can come up with another, less expensive, easier to implement plan that will address the problem, at least for now. Come on, man. Think.

2. Incompetent  #MeToo  Hypocrite Of The Year. I can’t believe I once advocated Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer as the best female VP option for Joe Biden since he has announced that he will be choosing the most female individual rather than the most qualified one. In addition to being one of the elected officials the pandemic has exposed as an aspiring dictator, she’s the state house version of Kamala Harris: ask her a question requiring thought and a clear response, and you get obfuscation and double-talk. Here’s the exchange that won her title,  from last Sunday’s ” State of the Union.with Jake Tapper:

TAPPER:  “You have said that you believe Vice President Biden. I want to compare that to 2018, when you said you believed Dr. Christine Blasey Ford after she accused now Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assault. Kavanaugh also, like Biden, categorically denied that accusation. And Blasey Ford, to be honest, she did not have the contemporaneous accounts of her view of what happened that Tara Reade does. You have spoken movingly about how you’re a survivor — survivor of assault yourself. Why do you believe Biden, and not Kavanaugh? Are they not both entitled to the same presumption of innocence, regardless of their political views?”

WHITMER: “You know, Jake, as a survivor and as a feminist, I will say this. We need to give people an opportunity to tell their story. But then we have a duty to vet it. And just because you’re a survivor doesn’t mean that every claim is equal. It means we give them the ability to make their case, and the other side as well, and then to make a judgment that is informed. I have read a lot about this current allegation. I know Joe Biden, and I have watched his defense. And there’s not a pattern that goes into this. And I think that, for these reasons, I’m very comfortable that Joe Biden is who he says he is. He’s — and you know what? And that’s all I’m going to say about it. I really resent the fact that, every time a case comes up, all of us survivors have to weigh in. It is reopening wounds. And it is — take us at our word, ask us for our opinion, and let’s move on.”

Weasel, hypocrite, coward, dim wit.

To be blunt.

  • She had to know she would be asked this question, and the best she could come up with was, essentially, “How dare you ask such a question–I’m a survivor!” and “move on”? Translation: “I have no answer for that question other than the obvious fact that Biden’s a Democrat and as a Democrat I apply different standard to him than I do to Republicans. And you, as a member of the mainstream media, our party’s ally in defeating the Bad Orange Man, are supposed to have our backs.”
  • But Reade has not been given a chance to make her case. Blasey Ford got a national forum. How has Reade been vetted? Whitmer is just throwing up any excuse she can think of whether it makes sense or not.
  • Oh, no! Pelosi’s “I know Joe Biden” defense? That’s the best she can do? Among other things, Whitmer doesn’t know Joe Biden especially well. There are spouses of serial killers who don’t know what their husbands are capable of, and she’s saying that the accused should be exonerated because their friends and relatives can’t imagine him doing what has been alleged?

Continue reading →