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Ethics Quiz: Jim McGreevey Rises Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

It comes down to two alternative words: redemption or chutzpah.

Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned from his position in 2004 after announcing to the world that he had been living a lie and was gay, as his crushed wife stood loyally by his side. (She then divorced him as soon as she could.) He’s been wandering in the wilderness ever since, but yesterday he formally reentered politics by announcing his intention to become mayor of the state’s second largest city, Jersey City, last week.

A lawyer with the Georgetown Law Center degree and a Masters from Harvard, he was considered a rising Democratic Party star with a picture-perfect family and obvious ability. But a man he had appointed to a position in his administration under odd circumstances threatened to sue McGreevey for sexual harassment, and shortly thereafter, the governor was making a sensational statement at a press conference in which he revealed that he was a “gay American” and that he had engaged in an adulterous affair with a man. He then announced that he would resign, which McGreevey did, though he delayed long enough to avoid a special election.

And now…he’s baaaaack!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it ethical to give McGreevey another chance at elected office?

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ProPublica (aka. Progressives) Believe That Foster Parents Should Not Be Able To Legally Intervene To Stop Birth Parents From Regaining Custody Of Children Removed From Their Care. I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’ll go farther than that. I don’t believe that parents who have had children removed from their care for neglect and being unfit parents should ever be allowed to regain custody, if the original removal was justified.

To consider and discuss the ethical issue, read this article, ProPublica’s “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby: In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.” It’s too long and detailed for me to summarize fairly, and make no mistake, it’s an excellent overview of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts involved even if the author’s bias is clear.

The author focuses on a particular conflict between birth parents and foster parents in Colorado while also revealing the different approaches taken by various states. I learned a lot: for example, having adopted our son Grant as an infant in Russia in 1995, I exhaled a long “whew!” after reading this:

“…It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.”

The article attempts to focus on what the author apparently believes is an especially sympathetic couple (above) trying to regain custody of a child placed in a foster home:

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And Speaking Of Not Being Able To Trust Public Schools …KABOOM!!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In Fairfield, Maine, Eric Sack father discovered a plastic baggie containing doses of prescription anti-depressants in the possession of his daughter. His daughter told him that the pills had been provided to her by the Bulldog Health Center, a School Based Health Center (SBHC) at Lawrence High School, where she is a student.

Yeah, right. I thought she was lying too, but the daughter wasn’t wasn’t. The federally funded health clinic that operates within the school gave the pills to her without his knowledge or consent.

How could this happen?

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Comment Of The Day: “I Don’t Feel I Can Trust The Teachers,” Says A Colorado Parent. Gee, Lady, What Was Your First Clue?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In “Free Fall,” a novel by William Golding of “Lord of the Flies” fame, the narrator searches through his past to try to learn when he lost control of his life. I think about that relatively obscure novel, an odd addition to a college course reading list, frequently, but not in relation to my own life (which has either always been out of control or, depending on how you look at it, entirely within my control). I think about in relations to topics like what Here’s Johnny is writing about in his Comment of the Day.

When did teaching professionals lose control of their common sense, professional ethics and respect for parents? It isn’t just them, of course: politicians, lawyers, judges, academics, doctors, journalists, prosecutors, corporate executives and more have all jumped the metaphorical rails during the Great Stupid, and even before. What did it? What was the tipping point?

That’s a topic for another day, I suppose. Right now, this Comment of the Day is a concise, clear statement of what was once an uncontroversial truth. But what the hell happened???

With his Comment of the Day on the post, “I Don’t Feel I Can Trust The Teachers,” Says A Colorado Parent. Gee, Lady, What Was Your First Clue?,” Heeeeere’s Here’s Johnny!….

***

I taught high school students for 20 years, a second career for me, and up through the time I retired from that 14 years ago, I never encountered this kind of thinking, that parents must be kept in the dark when it comes to a dramatic life-changing situation for their child. As OB asks [I paraphrase], ‘What the hell is it with gender ID anyway?’

It was true when I was teaching and it is true now that teachers have a special role in helping kids through those many difficult years of growing up. Are there things a kid might tell a teacher that they wouldn’t tell their parents? Yes, of course. Are there parents who would react in a way not in the best interests of the child? Yes, or course. And, responsible teachers have to know the difference, when to tell the kid that, ‘This is something I cannot keep in confidence; I have to discuss it with your parent(s)’, or, alternatively, “This is something that you will have to think about very seriously, maybe do some reading, maybe talk to a guidance counselor, maybe meet with the school psychologist’, and so on.

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A Cautionary Tale: The Worst Social Media Influencer Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(Don’t bet on it.)

Here at Ethics Alarms we try to steer clear of posts on conduct that is so obviously unethical that even the dimmest MSNBC host could figure it out. Normally, a mother being arrested after one of her kids escapes from the home, emaciated and with restraint marks, and begs a next door neighbor for help, would fall into this category. But this mother was a renowned web expert on parenting, with a popular Instagram account and YouTube channel. Her @moms_of_truth account on Instagram had 341,000 followers, and until it was mysteriously shut down last year, her “8 Passengers” YouTube channel (named after her, her husband, and their six kids)had a very profitable subscriber base of almost 2.3 million.

Ruby Franke, the wise and admired mom, was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated child abuse in Ivins, Utah this week. A press release issued by the Santa Clara-Ivins Public Safety Department stated that on Aug. 30, 2023 “a report came into our dispatch center regarding a juvenile asking for help.” Franke’s son, 12, had “climbed out of a window and ran to a neighbor’s home,” according to the police booking affidavit. The boy asked the neighbor for food and water. “The neighbor observed duct tape on (the boy’s) ankles and wrists and contacted law enforcement. Upon arrival, law enforcement judged the boy’s wounds and malnourishment to be “severe.”

Funny, Ruby never discussed that child-rearing technique on the web…

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Another Ethics Quizworthy Query To “The Ethicist”: The Dying Man’s Secret

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

My mind’s made up on this one, and I disagree with “The Ethicist’s” answer, but I have a strong bias, and I want to see what EA readers think. “Name Withheld,” who for some reasons sends The Ethicist (Kwame Anthony Appiah) a lot of questions, asked in part,

I am 76 and have lived a full and interesting life. My doctor recently gave me the news that the cancer I was treated for last year has returned and metastasized. I have started a course of immunotherapy treatments that, hopefully, should keep the cancer at bay for roughly the next two years.

I have not told my wife, my son or any of my friends about this. I don’t want to have to endure two years of pity. I would rather enjoy life with everyone as I have always done — and then break the news only when the time comes….Am I wrong to keep this from the people I love?

The Ethicist replies that he is wrong. “By depriving your loved ones of the facts, you deprive them of the chance to face the future together with you,” he concludes. “Because your diagnosis affects their lives as well, I hope you’ll let them come to terms with this important truth.”

Your Ethics Alarms Labor Day Weekend Ethics Quiz is…

Is “The Ethicist” right?

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The Answer To This Controversy Is Legally And Ethically Obvious And We Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Doesn’t Think So

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Americans are losing faith in their schoolteachers,” the Washington Post proclaimed a year ago. Gee, I wonder why…

California’s woke attorney general, Rob Bonta, has filed a lawsuit against Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County to halt the county’s requirement that parents be notified when their child changes pronouns or gender identity, or seeks to use a bathroom assigned to a gender opposite to his or hers. In other words, the legal representative of the California state government wants the state to have the authority to withhold information about a family’s minor children from the parents of those children at the discretion of its agents. This attitude is now rampant in schools around the country, primarily because the education community has been thoroughly politicized and is no longer trustworthy.

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My Answer To “Name Withheld’s” Question To “The Ethicist”: “Tell Sis To Shut The Hell Up!” Yours?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:

“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…

“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”

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“The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m recommending the Showtime series “The Affair,” now streaming its five seasons (the show ran in 53 episodes from 2014-2019), as a challenging and perceptive ethics show. Covering, as you might guess, a sexual and romantic affair involving two couples and their extended family, and the chaotic consequences the illicit relationship triggers, the “The Affair” reaches into relationship ethics, friendship ethics, marital ethics, parenting ethics, community ethics, legal ethics, academic ethics and artistic ethics, and probably more: I’m finally watching the whole thing after seeing the third and fourth seasons a few years ago. Wrapped up in those larger categories are questions involving honesty, loyalty, conflicts of interest, empathy, and abuse of power.

The one irritant in “The Affair” is the scarcity of genuinely ethical or admirable characters. The closest is probably the primary victim of the affair, the adulterous writer’s wife, played by Maura Tierney (of “ER” fame). One aspect of the show that will benefit many is how awful so many of the parents portrayed in the show are: if you question your parenting abilities, “The Affair” will restore your confidence. (So far, my favorite moment was when a grown daughter finally orders her incredibly over-bearing, toxic and manipulative mother out of her home, saying, curtly, “I hate you.”

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“They’re Here!!!” How Do People Get This Way, And Why Do They Now Think It’s To Their Benefit To Display Their Malady?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I usually keep a watchful eye on advice columns, especially “The Ethicist,” Carolyn Hax and a few others, but have been a bit lax of late. Thus I missed this astounding letter sent to “Ask Amy,” which was bought to my attention by loyal reader and frequent commenter Jeff.

Hold on to your heads or erect signs nearby warning others that they are in a potential head-explosion zone…

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