Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote Of The Week: My Progressive, Rational, Educated and Gay Facebook Friend”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

stereotypes

Unlike most Comments of the Day, this one by Penn/Same Penn, who has two aliases here due to WordPress’s inexplicable habit of eating his posts, requires some back-reading to fully appreciate…but it is worth the effort.

The original post is about a Facebook friend’s mass condemnation of the Lone star State as a frightening, bigoted and  violent place where he would never set foot, in part because of his anger over Houston’s rejection last week of a bill that would expand LGBT civil rights in the city. My post noted that painting Texas with such a broad and harsh brush is itself bigotry—a position that cannot be rebutted, I believe—and reader Neil protested that the anti-Texas and Texans sentiment was just.

This inspired P/SP to one of the most eloquent and thoughtful posts Ethics Alarms has ever received, on any topic, and his is complex here, far ranging from its inspiration.

Here is Penn’s Comment of the Day on the post, Unethical Quote Of The Week: My Progressive, Rational, Educated and Gay Facebook Friend: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Anti-Washington Redskins Activist’s Bob Marley Costume

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
The Native American in the middle is dressed as a famous Jamaican. Would it have been offensive if he dressed as Sitting Bull?

The Native American in the middle is dressed as a famous Jamaican. Would it have been offensive if he dressed as Sitting Bull?

Terry Rambler, chief of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, has  been at the forefront of the effort to force The Washington Redskins, a privately owned NFL sports franchise, to change its name and logo of long-standing because both are allegedly racist. [ As I have made clear many times, the team’s name is not racist, as neither its origins nor current use suggest or imply racist intent, purpose or impact, and the team’s owner has a First Amendment right to call his team whatever he wants. The decades long political correctness stunt has gained more traction under the Obama administration, because the Obama Administration and Senate Democrats do not respect the Constitution or follow it when it gets in the way of its agenda. (See: drones, Obamacare, immigration, NSA domestic spying, harassment of reporters, IRS partisan activities, recess appointments, Libya bombing, selective prosecution,  putting government pressure on the Redskins to change its name, etc… )

But I digress.

This year, Rambler’s Halloween costume was Jamaican musician Bob Marley, complete with dreadlocks, wig, and rasta beanie. He also wore appropriate make-up to look like Marley.

Here is what the chief looks like most days:

Terry

Here he is on Halloween as the Reggae icon…

Halloween Marley

The costume is making  Rambler the target of criticism from both sides of the controversy: Redskins defenders who view his make-up as “blackface” and thus hypocritical, and his own Team Political Correctness, which sees Rambler as engaging in the same kind of insensitive conduct they claim the Washington Redskins embody.

To make things worse for Rambler, there was another recent Bob Marley controversy in  Gaston County, (North Carolina), where a sheriff’s captain  apologized  for wearing dark make-up as part of her own Marley Halloween costume after her in-costume photo appeared online.

And thus your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was the Native American activist’s Bob Marley make-up unethical or hypocritical?

Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Hate Speech…No, Wait, It’s A Gay Writer Hating A Straight Baseball Player, So It’s All Good

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Daniel Murphy

 

In March, in a post about Dr. Ben Carson’s awful apology for his ignorant statement on CNN about prison turning prisoners gay, I compared his ignorance to that of Mets second-baseman Daniel Murphy, who had just listened to Billy Bean, a former major league baseball player who is gay, and had been appointed as the sport’s “ambassador for inclusion.”  Murphy said,

“I disagree with his lifestyle.I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect. Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100 percent.”

His statement loosely translated means, “I don’t know anything about gays except what I have been told by people who also know nothing about gays but think they do.  I believed all of it, since, honestly, I don’t think about the topic much. But the question was about whether the fact that a team mate was gay would cause me to distrust him or not want to play with him, and my answer is no.”

Later Murphy elaborated,

“Maybe, as a Christian, that we haven’t been as articulate enough in describing what our actual stance is on homosexuality. We love the people. We disagree the lifestyle. That’s the way I would describe it for me. It’s the same way that there are aspects of my life that I’m trying to surrender to Christ in my own life. There’s a great deal of many things, like my pride.”

I mentioned Murphy then because he, unlike Carson, is just a baseball player, and his having ignorant ideas about gays (what does “disagreeing” with the fact that someone is gay even mean? He’s gay–you can’t “disagree.” Anyone using “lifestyle” to describe gays has just written his ignorance in sky-writing. If one knows any gays at all, the idiocy of this is manifest. What would ever make an 8 year old wake up one morning and say, “I’ve weighed the options, and made my choice: I want to be gay!” This literally never happens.) and stating the ideas out loud only hurts Murphy, while Carson’s ignorance is relevant to the job he’s seeking and his qualifications for it. Carson is a narrow, biased, irresponsible amateur, and thus unqualified to hold office. Nobody, however, should care what Murphy thinks, as long as he can hit and field his position.

For someone who is clueless, Murphy’s comments are even admirable. He’s not going to judge a man’s character based on “his lifestyle” or wish him ill, which makes him infinitely preferable to Slate’s gay issues blogger, Mark Joseph Stern. Continue reading →

The Harvard Law School Seal: Apparently They Are No Longer Teaching Critical Thinking At Harvard Law School

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

H Law SchoolSee that seal to the left? Apparently that is a racist symbol that must be banned. At least that’s the conclusion a group of Harvard Law School students have come to, thus compelling my conclusion that either Harvard Law School is no longer a trustworthy institution for training young minds in relentlessly logical analysis as the practice of law at 400 bucks an hour requires, or that it is admitting too many students so indoctrinated in mindless progressive cant that they are beyond help.

These young adults need to skip the law and go straight to community organizing.

I’m sure all of you saw the bushels of wheat in the Harvard Law School seal and immediately recoiled in disgust and horror. No? That’s because need a masters in Obscure Harvard History to understand what these fanatics are complaining about:

From the Harvard Crimson:

A new student movement at Harvard Law School is organizing to change the seal at the school, which the students argue represents and endorses a slaveholding legacy. The seal is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder who endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard.

They have launched a Facebook page and are now in the process of further organizing. They are drafting a letter to send to the Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow with their positions, according to Mawuse H. Vormawor, a Law School student and organizer of the effort. Students involved in the effort argued that imagery from a slaveholding era has no place at today’s Harvard Law School.

“These symbols set the tone for the rest of the school and the fact that we hold up the Harvard crest as something to be proud of when it represents something so ugly is a profound disappointment and should be a source of shame for the whole school,” said Alexander J. Clayborne, one of the Law students involved.

Vormawor pointed to the research and scholarship of visiting Law School professor Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently published a book about the first century of Harvard Law School, as inspiration for the movement. In the book, Coquillette details the relationship between the Royall family’s slaveholding and the endowment of the Law School.

Thus proceeds the process of airbrushing history, withdrawing credit that has been justly  earned, and judging past figures  by the standards of today. This is a particularly silly example, as the design of the seal is likely to be meaningless to 99% of Harvard law students, not to mention 99.99999% of everyone else. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: My Progressive, Rational, Educated and Gay Facebook Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

texas-alamo-H

“I never want to step foot in Texas. I don’t even want to change planes in an airport there. In fairness to Texas, there are several states in this country that I refuse to visit, not in a political boycott way but in a I’d-rather-not-get-harassed-by-white-trash-or-shot-by-a-gun-nut kind of way. Basically, you won’t be seeing any pics of our family in the Deep South…ever!”

——-Posted to Facebook by a Facebook friend.

It constantly astonishes me that otherwise kind and intelligent people who regard themselves as tolerant, accepting and enemies of prejudice and bigotry can be so devoid of self-awareness that they openly display not only their own irrational bias and ignorance as if it is a badge of honor, but also think that avoiding new data and experiences that challenge their facile assumptions makes them look wise and virtuous.

Bulletin to my friend: This makes you look like a hateful fool, and I know you are not.

I’m waiting to see how many “likes” his post gets; I assume a lot. I don’t know who it was who first observed that as we age we tend to become the kind of human being we hate the most, but it struck me as a perceptive observation the first time I heard it, and I have never read a more perfect example of the phenomenon.

 

 

The Unlikely Ethics Dunce, And Why Nobody Pays Attention To Ethicists And I Don’t Blame Them

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Wait, how can the nation's most famous ethicist be an Ethics Dunce? It's not easy...

Wait, how can the nation’s most famous ethicist be an Ethics Dunce? It’s not easy…

Ethicists have managed to make ethics nearly invisible in our cultural debates, and nearly useless as a decision-making tool, when it ought to be the most useful tool of all. They accomplished this over centuries of work, making the discipline of ethics abstruse, elitist, abstract, and worse of all, boring. Nobody should be bored with ethics, hence my statement, “Ethics isn’t boring, ethicists are.” Once ethics was pigeon-holed in the realm of philosophy, however (it belongs with “crucial life skills” and “critical thinking”) and philosophy became associated with scholarship, advanced degrees and academia, the jig was up.

The problem is that academic ethicists teach and write about abstract ethics, and life is not abstract. Their quest is for one formula to determine right from wrong, and life and human beings are more complicated than any one formula can encompass. When I started this blog, I got a lot of grad students writing me who demanded to know whether I was a Utilitarian,  Kantian Deontologist, a follower of Natural Law Ethics,  a Virtue Ethicist or a devotee of Stakeholder theory. My answer was “all of the above and none of them.” All of these and more are useful tools of analysis, but none work all the time, and the amount of words loaded into jargon to explain and debate the nuances of any of them render them all useless except for  writing scholarly papers.

The ethics that the public learns, as a result, are what pop culture and society teach them, and most of that isn’t ethics at all. For example, in the cable series “The Affair,” a well-educated older man was advising a young woman, the mistress in the affair, about how to think about the illicit relationship that broke up he lover’s marriage. Wise and thoughtful, he described his own adulterous affair, and then said, “What you did wasn’t wrong. You didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t break any laws.  Don’t be so hard on yourself.”  There is no ethics in that statement. Itis just employs two popular and facile rationalizations (#4. Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical,” and #22, the worst of all, #22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.”) with another lurking but unspoken one, the Cheater’s Special, #23. Woody’s Excuse: “The heart wants what the heart wants,’ underlying the whole scene.

That’s ethics, I would guess, to about 90% of the population. Scary. This is, however, where ethicists have taken us. They could be so important to the culture, if they would get their heads out of their asinine models and explain ethical principles that are relevant to real lives in a manner that doesn’t make normal people become hostile to the subject.

This brings us to Peter Singer, Princeton’s acclaimed professor of bioethics who has been called the most influential ethicist alive. It is admittedly faint praise, but probably correct. Continue reading →

Debate Questions No Democrat Will Ever Be Asked (2): “Do You Agree With The Obama Dept. Of Education That A School Must Allow A Physically Male Student Who Identifies As Female And Is A Member Of A Girl’s Sports Team To Change And Shower In The Girls’ Locker Room Without Restrictions?”

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

showers

It is ironic that so soon after Rachel Dolezal finally admitted the undeniable and agreed that she is, in fact, white, the federal government accepted the Caitlyn Jenner Fallacy and declared that all it takes to turn a male into a female for school policy purposes is feelings, no re-assembly required.

From the New York Times:

Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district [Township High School District 211] violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions. 

To be blunt, and I mean blunt, this means that if a human being with a fully functioning penis says he’s a girl, a public high school is obligated by the Constitution to pretend he does not have said penis, and he must be treated as a girl and no different from any other girls in all respects. This right that nobody ever heard of before thereby means that the boy-with-a-penis-who-identifies-as-a-girl-without- one is legally able to demand that he is allowed to embarrass, upset and threaten girls who do not have cocks by forcing them, rather than him—oops, her— to dress and shower away from the group.

Everyone except the victimized members of the school’s team are wrong on this one, and there will be consequences. The school was wrong to pander to a nascent transgender social justice warrior by allowing him-becoming-her to be on the girls team in the first place.”Here’s the rule,” they should have said, “The only way we can separate girls and boys is the same way doctors do when a baby is born. How you feel is irrelevant. Which team you want to be on is irrelevant. If you have a penis, which you do, and no vagina, which you do not, then you play on the boy’s teams, or no team at all. Your choice.” Unfortunately, most school are not just run by liberals, but cowardly, intellectually lazy liberals. Nor did they see that transgender activists, like most activists, will push for more and more until they end up alienating many who support their basic argument.

Then there is the boy/girl, who was offered reasonable accommodations by the school, and decided to be a trailblazer for all similarly encumbered self-identifying females [ I made a cheap and vulgar reference here, and deleted it. I am ashamed.] and fight for their right to parade such male accessories in the faces of young women who should not have to be confronted with them in the girl’s shower.

Read my commentary on this problem. I am sympathetic, and I believe that the transitioning male-born kid who is certain that he has no snakes and snails and puppy dog tails inside should be respected and treated with dignity and compassion on his way to her-dom. He shouldn’t be bullied and he shouldn’t be discriminated against. But a rule that holds “No penises in the girl’s shower ” is not discrimination. It is common sense. It is manners.

Nor does transitioning genders make it ethical to be an asshole. Continue reading →

From The Halloween Files: Arachnophobia Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

creepy-spider-halloween-decoration

I love this story!

Early last month, several secretaries in the Logan County (West Virginia) Prosecutor’s Office put up Halloween decorations, including a lot of big hanging fake spiders.  When he saw them, Assistant Prosecutor Chris White freaked out, saying he had arachnophobia, that the decorations weren’t funny, and he couldn’t stand the eight legged things. Then he pulled out his gun, and threatened to shoot the spiders. The gun had no clip, but the staff wasn’t sure; after all, if you are crazy enough to try to shoot fake spiders with an empty gun, you are probably crazy enough to  shoot fake spiders with a loaded gun. The three secretaries who witnessed the meltdown were terrified.

White was suspended for the incident. He’s been with the office for more than five years, according to his boss, John Bennett,who  took it well, saying, “I never saw it coming, that’s for sure. Obviously, I wouldn’t have even hired him if I had seen it coming. And the fact that he’s been there five years and we haven’t had any incidents like this also, to me, is a pretty good indication it’s certainly out of the ordinary.”

Hmmm. How ordinary does drawing a firearm  in an office because of Halloween decorations have to be before you decide, “You know, maybe this guy should be someplace else”? Continue reading →

But This ISN’T A Spoof, Unfortunately: A PhD Professor Of Gender Studies Writes An Amazing Op-Ed For Gun Control

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

Hold on to your cranium.

This is a real person. Unfortunately.

This is a real person. Unfortunately.

This morning an esteemed commentator, while discussing Melissa Harris-Perry, fell for one of those “if you fall for it, it’s a hoax and you’re an idiot, if you don’t it’s just satire so mock anyone who did” websites that I have designated Unethical Websites in more than one month. Here’s the reason why he did: to rational people, the things card-carrying members of the extreme progressive/ Democratic axis are prone to assert, say or write with complete sincerity so often consist of content that just a few years ago would be considered proof positive of creeping insanity that it is nigh impossible to tell the difference. For example, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton want to expand Social Security. I was already preparing this post when the hoax site responsible for the quoted Harris-Perry story was reported, and it send me back again to check this one. It really is true, and thus tells us something quite disturbing, as I will specify later. The op-ed by Dr. Barbara Savoy is much more ridiculous than the parody.

The Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle asked Dr. Savoy, who teaches women and gender studies at The College at Brockport, a SUNY institution (Its tuition is $33,235 per year), to write an op-ed on gun control. She did, and here is a shortened version. You really should read the whole thing, though:

I voted for Barack Obama. Twice. During his 2008 presidential campaign, my two daughters, partner, and I ate every meal in our house on Obama placemats. We bought these at our local supermarket, plastic-coated, plate-sized paper rectangles with an image of his face framed by colors of the flag….
Continue reading →

Two Stories To Look Back Upon Ruefully When The Nation Has Gone To Pot And It’s Too Late To Reverse Course

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
Once heroin is legal, there will be no more heroin problem...

Once heroin is legal, there will be no more heroin problem...

One of the horrible results of the coming election—not as horrible as the possibility of electing Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump President, perhaps, but horrible still—will be the nation’s final capitulation to the movement started in the 1960’s to keep the country, the culture and the poor stoned. Cognitive dissonance will ensure it on the Republican side, as opponents to legal pot will be the same old fogeys who proclaim that gay marriage will destroy the earth, causing a valid and correct argument to be destroyed by a senseless one. Others in the party, caring about staying in power more than our society’s welfare, will just give in, citing the usual ethically inert rationalizations that legalizing drugs is the lesser of two evils and that we need to use treatment, not punishment. Meanwhile, Democrats will pander to its pot-loving base, while also stumping for state governments legalizing the crap to close budget deficits created by their fiscally irresponsible policies. Heck, even I would rather see the pot industry taxed instead of me.

And we will be bombarded by the pairing of pot legalization with the allegedly racist “mass incarceration problem,” which is really and truly the “too many African Americans break laws and expect to get away with it because their parents and culture don’t send the message that its a big deal” problem. The big deal they, and we, are now being told is that they get punished for breaking laws, which is racist because Black Lives Matter.

I was in court watching sentencings a couple months back in Northern Virginia. While the crimes the defendants being sentenced for were not drug related, every single one of those sentenced–-every one—had either  a pot charge dropped in favor of a guilty plea for a more serious crime, had record of drug arrests, or had tested positive for pot during while awaiting sentence or on parole. Bernie and Hillary and the gang (the gang including journalists, who like their weed) would have us believe that the prisons are just teeming with otherwise law-abiding black citizens who are there because they engaged in harmless recreational drug use and nothing else. The new paradigm, pushed by the President (of course), is that prison should only be for violent felons, not habitual scoff-laws who often dabble in violence too.

Ah, yes, this is all going to work out so well.

I  encountered two stories on the web that show the path we are on as well as the muddled thinking and dishonesty that got us there. Continue reading →