Gender and Sex

Indiana’s Unconstitutional, Unethical, Thoughtful, Subversive Abortion Law

/ Jack Marshall / 115 Comments
If you want to kill this no matter what, it's legal and ethical. If you just don't like its skin color or gender and want to kill it because of that, you're a monster....

If you want to kill this no matter what, it’s legal and ethical. If you just don’t like its skin color or gender and want to kill it because of that, you’re a monster….

Feminists, pro-abortion enthusiasts (They like it! They really like it!), the biased, brainless news media and kneejerk progressives who haven’t given abortion and its many ethical problems one-thousandth of the careful, objective thought it deserves are just dismissing the new Indiana law restricting abortion as one more “war on women” maneuver and yet another mindless attack on abortion rights. It is an attack on abortion rights, but hardly a mindless one, and Indiana deserves respect and some ethics points for aiming a law right at the fault line of dishonest pro–abortion logic.

Maybe the law will provoke some quality discussion before it goes down in flames, and maybe some abortion supporters will slap their heads and realize that the rhetorical and rational behind abortion is at its core intellectually dishonest. If so, it will have done some quantifiable good.

Maybe the law will be the tipping point that finally makes a significant number of ethical people who have blindly accepted the tortured logic behind the nation’s casual acceptance of millions upon millions of aborted human lives open their minds.

Maybe if I flap my arms really hard, can fly to the moon. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Salon And Old Donald Trump Date Lucy Klebanow

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

I’m not even going to quote from the lower-than-low-blow kiss-and-tell article by Lucy Klebanow in in Salon titled “My awful date with Donald Trump: The real story of a nightmare evening with a callow but cash-less heir.” I couldn’t finish reading it, so quickly was it apparently that I, like you, didn’t need to start, so self-evidently unethical and inexcusable was its motive and topic.  There is nothing newsworthy within it, and while its unjustifiable incursion into the area of privacy that every human being, even celebrities, have a right to enjoy isn’t quite at the Hulk Hogan sex tape level, it is no less wrong.

This same, mean-spirited, essay could be written about me, or you, and definitely about Lucy Klebanow, by anyone who happened to have a one-time social encounter with us that didn’t show us at our best. What has Donald Trump done to exempt him from the basic human courtesy of keeping the details of such inevitable social disasters on the way to maturity and wisdom between the two participants? Nothing. Nothing, because nothing, not even Trump’s own indiscretions about others, can do this. The Golden Rule applies here like epoxy: we don’t do this disgusting thing, because nobody wants their own repulsed bad dates to do it to them. It’s a terrible thing to do. To anyone. Period. No exceptions. Continue reading →

Pre-Unethical Conditions: Surrogate Mother Contracts And Making Babies With Jerks

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

womb-for-rent2Most surrogate mother arrangements work out exactly as intended by the participants. A couple or a single parent gets the biologically linked baby they bargained for, and the mother gets what she wanted, cash. To many the contracts seem unethical because the idea, only recently beyond the realm of science fiction, of a woman bearing another couple’s child, or allowing a stranger’s seed to impregnate her,  appears strange, unnatural and  icky, which it is. No, it is not unethical, but it is what we call a pre-unethical condition, a situation that lays a foundation for unethical conduct and results if care isn’t taken and one or more participants lack functioning ethics alarms. Three recent episodes demonstrate how icky can turn to unethical, especially when the wrong kind of people are involved.

I. The Unwanted Triplet, continued.

Earlier this year, Ethics Alarms hosted a spirited debate regarding Melissa Cook, a surrogate who fought against the man who owned her three unborn triplets, having rented out her womb to gestate them. He wanted to have one of them aborted, because two babies were all he felt he could support. She refused, and challenged the surrogacy contract in court. I asked… Continue reading →

Unethical Artificial Intelligence Teenaged Girl Web Bot Of The Month: Microsoft’s “Tay”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Tay

Developers in Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams made “Tay,” an Artificial Intelligence web-bot, to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” She spoke in text, memes and emoji on severalf different platforms, including Kik, Groupme and Twitter ‘”like a teen girl.”  Microsoft marketed her as “The AI with zero chill.” You could chat with Tay by tweeting or  Direct Messaging  the bot at @tayandyou on Twitter. Though she was programmed to use millennial slang and be up to date on pop culture, she was, like Arnold the good cyborg in “Terminator 2,”  designed so she would learn from her online interactions with humans, and you know how ethical humans are.

Within 24 hours, Tay was asking strangers she called “daddy” to “fuck” her, expressing doubts that the Holocaust was real and saying things  like “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now;” “Donald Trump is the only hope we’ve got;” “Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong” and “Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler…that’s what I’ve heard so many others say.” For Tay, becoming more human meant becoming a vulgar, sex-obsessed, racist, anti-Semitic, Nazi-loving Trump supporter.

Imagine what her values would be like in 48 hours. Wisely, Microsoft is not willing to chance it, and Tay is now unplugged and awaiting either reprogramming or replacement. One of Tay’s last tweets was,

“Okay. I’m done. I feel used.”

Oh, yes, this artificial intelligence stuff is bound to work out well.

____________________

Pointer: Althouse

The North Carolina Transgender Bathroom Freak-Out, LGBT Activists And Shared Accountability For An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 118 Comments

rest rooms gender

Yes, the new North Carolina anti-LGBT law is excessive, dumb, an over-reaction and probably unconstitutional. More than that, however, it is an example what can happen when the proponents of opposing views refuse to listen to or respect each other, don’t attempt to minimize bitterness and conflict, and prefer to settle problems by going to war. The law exemplifies the ignorance, fear and reflex defensiveness of human beings when faced with inevitable cultural change, but it could have been avoided if LGBT activists and advocates had not demonized their opponents and used political leverage to push for extreme positions that were neither necessary nor clearly correct.

North Carolina’s conservatives are horrified at the idea of biological males being allowed to use women’s rest rooms when the “males” identify as female, so the state passed a law that appears to allow all forms of discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. The new law establishes a statewide nondiscrimination ordinance that explicitly supersedes any local nondiscrimination measures. The statewide protections cover race, religion, color, national origin and biological sex,  but not sexual orientation or gender identity. Whether it is intended to do so or not, this seems to say that in the eyes of North Carolina, discrimination against LGBT citizens is fine and reasonable.

Well, it isn’t, and thus the law itself is unethical—incompetent, irresponsible, unfair, unjust, uncaring, and disrespectful.

Good job, State legislature,  Gov. Pat McCrory, and North Carolina. You’re all an embarrassment to the nation.

Still, this whole mess  occurred because activists couldn’t come up with a reasonable accommodation that would still the concerns of those old fashioned citizens who think ladies rooms shouldn’t be frequented by people who can pee standing up, while still meeting the minimal requirements of the Caitlyn Jenners of the world. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Above the Law’s Joe Patrice

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[C]onsensual relationships with adults don’t seem like a big deal. Sure, the conflict of interest of sleeping with someone in your class is deserving of discipline, but, really, in a state where you can marry your sister, is it a fireable offense to hookup with a twenty-something attorney-to-be? Obviously, if there were more serious allegations that would be another matter, but so far we’ve only learned of this more benign brand of misconduct.

—-Above the Law writer Joe Patrice, commenting, incompetently, on the firing of Virginia University College of Law Professor Arthur Rizer, for having sexual relations with multiple students.

Professor Rizer, the Sam Malone of West Virginia University College of Law...

Professor Rizer, the Sam Malone of West Virginia University College of Law…

This commentary, from a regular writer for a website that covers law schools, is so ethically obtuse and legally ignorant that he should be fired. “Not a big deal”? Sexual harassment at law firms is a very big deal as well as a very big problem, and a law professor who flagrantly violates an anti-harassment policy like the prohibition against professors treating the student body as their own personal dating bar is teaching that seeking sex with subordinates is culturally acceptable in the legal profession. It isn’t. It never has been.

The professor’s conflict of interest is the least of his self-created problems. First, there is no valid consent in such cases. The professor has real and perceived control over students’ academic success and legal career viability. This is classic inequality of power that gives a professor implied leverage over a student’s “consent” to sexual relations. Moreover, the knowledge that a professor is having sex with students constitutes third-party sexual harassment. Do other students assume that they are expected to have sex with the professor if he requests it? Is the professor looking at female students as mere sex objects? Are students that provide sexual access more likely to get high grades? What happens to students who say “no”? This creates a hostile environment for study and education. Continue reading →

Yes, Ethics Dunce Madonna Indeed Engaged in Sexual Assault On Stage In Australia

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Why would anyone think otherwise?

From the Guardian:

It began when 17-year-old Josephine Georgiou joined the singer [above] on stage during her second evening at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre.

“She’s the kind of girl you just want to slap on the ass,” the singer said admiringly of the barista and would-be model standing next to her. “And pull,” Madonna added, yanking down the girl’s strapless top to briefly reveal one breast, to aghast cheers from the crowd.

The Ethics Of Judges In Love

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

gavel heart

When  attorney Joe Foley represented a client in a matter before Judge Scott Drazewski in early 2011, he was unaware that the married judge was involved a year-long secret romantic affair with Judge Rebecca Foley, the attorney’s wife.

Now both Illinois judges  have been disciplined by state legal ethics authorities for failing to reveal their romantic relationship and violating multiple ethics rules as a result. The ethics commission imposed a four-month unpaid suspension on Drazewski for “egregious” judicial ethics violations, and censured Judge Foley for assisting, aiding, abetting, and not reporting his violation or their affair. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Hypocrisy (Among Other Things)…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Hypocrisy meter

I thought Eliot Spitzer set a high bar for hypocritical prosecutors, but Ingham County (Michigan)  Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings makes him look like a piker.

Dunnings, a well-respected prosecutor since 1997 and an outspoken advocate for ending human trafficking and prostitution, is facing fifteen  criminal charges in Ingham, Clinton and Ionia counties, including ten counts of prostitution, pandering and four counts of willful neglect of duty.

Investigators connected to a 2015 federal investigation into a Michigan-based human trafficking ring determined that between 2010 and 2015, Dunnings paid for sex hundreds of times with many women whom he contacted using escort websites. Dunnings also allegedly induced one woman to become a prostitute,leading to the pandering charge, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years. The prosecutor’s  brother, Lansing attorney Steven Dunnings, was also charged with two counts of prostitution.

Ethics Alarms frequently finds itself annoyed by mistaken, incorrect or unfair accusations of hypocrisy, and is grateful to Dunning, who claimed to be dedicated to wiping out human trafficking and prostitution while he was really supporting both with his patronage, for giving us a clear and unequivocal demonstration of what real hypocrisy looks like.

Dead Ethics Alarms At CNN: Gee, What Could Be Wrong With “Objective” Moderators Kissing One Of The Candidates?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Good catch by Ann Althouse: Hillary Clinton walks onto the stage last night and gets kisses on the cheek from CNN town hall moderators Jake Tapper and Roland Martin. What the hell?

This is unethical  in so many ways…

It suggests excessive familiarity between the journalists and the candidate, undermining the credibility of the journalists…

It perpetuates and validates a sexist, demeaning custom that causes problems for women in the workplace. As usual, Hillary is a feminist, unless she isn’t….

It creates an appearance of impropriety….

It signals that journalists are not objective, critical reporters, but friends and colleagues of those they exist to criticize….

It’s a double standard, for a kiss is not the same as a handshake. Either kiss Bernie Sanders too, or don’t kiss Hillary….

It is flagrantly unprofessional….

Also, ick.

It took a while, but CNN’s unethical culture is finally corrupting Jake Tapper.