Gender and Sex

A New “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” For Conservative Politicians? You Wish, Jennifer Rubin…

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

creationismOne of the Washington Post’s rare conservative columnists has a solution for GOP candidates and office holders whose views on some subjects are likely to make them targets of furious criticism: refuse to express them. She writes in her latest column:

“Not everything is a political issue, nor one on which politicians have any particular insight. Candidates are not asked their views on divorce, for example. Each state has laws on the topic, and one’s religious views aren’t a topic for public debate. It is not (and shouldn’t be) asked of nor answered by politicians…Creationism? Unless you are running for school board and intend to be guided by your religious convictions, it does not matter. Born again? None of my business.

“…[Q]uestions about creationism, gay marriage, the nature of homosexuality and other value-specific questions serve no purpose other than to provide targets for faux outrage. These questions are designed to divide the population into believers and nonbelievers, between those who share the same cultural touchstones and those who differ.

“If a topic has no relevance to public policy or character or fitness to serve, why ask the question and why answer it? We aren’t electing pastors, family counselors or philosophers; we’re electing politicians whose job description and qualifications don’t include a great many topics. If we are heading for a more tolerant society, we have to agree to disagree on some issues and to respect some realm of private opinion and faith. For Republicans running in 2016, I would suggest a simple response to the sort of question intended to provoke divisiveness over irrelevant topics: “I can’t think of a single instance in which [creationism/the origin of homosexuality] would be relevant. I’m not here to sow division or take sides in faith-based debates. Let’s talk about something germane to the presidency.”

Wrong.

Incredibly wrong. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Reporter’s Non-Compliant Shoulders

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Appropriate courtroom fashion?

Appropriate courtroom fashion?

At the 2nd District Court in Ogden, Utah, female reporter Morgan Briesmaster was barred by court security from entering the courtroom to cover a story because her sleeveless blouse (left) violated the official dress code.

She eventually gained access by wearing a parka. Up until then, she told other journalists, she waited in the lobby  “where she watched other courtgoers stroll through security with jeans and low-cut shirts.” Her boss ridiculed the situation, comparing it to high school yearbook dress codes, and noted that “any time a reporter is stopped from covering the news, it’s a concern.” There actually is a rule against wearing “tank tops” in that court, but I wouldn’t call what Briesmaster wore a tank top.
 

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz, which you may think is too easy, is this:

Was the court security unfair and unreasonable to bar reporter Briesmaster based on her shoulder-baring clothing?

Continue reading →

Scott Esk, The Tea Party, And Leon Festinger’s Warning

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Ignore Leon at your peril, Republicans!

Ignore Leon at your peril, Republicans!

A Texas Republican, using my least favorite rationalization (#22. Comparative Virtue, or “It’s not the worst thing”)  to excuse the party’s intentionally insulting anti-gay platform, could argue, “Hey! At least we don’t want gays to be stoned to death!”

True. That would be the position of Tea Party candidate for the Oklahoma state Senate, Scott Esk.

In a Facebook exchange last year, Esk indeed endorsed, without espousing, killing gays:

“That [stoning gay people to death] goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss…I never said I would author legislation to put homosexuals to death, but I didn’t have a problem with it.”

Contacted by Oklahoma magazine to clarify his remarks, Esk did indeed, saying:

 “That was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God and in that time there it was totally just. It came directly from God. I have no plans to reinstitute that in Oklahoma law. I do have some very huge moral misgivings about those kinds of sins…I know what was done in the Old Testament and what was done back then was what’s just. … And I do stand for Biblical morality.”

Before going further, I have to give Esk integrity points for not claiming that he was taken out of context or misunderstood. He was honest, he accepted responsibility for his words, and he didn’t try to “walk back” his statement, as is the current fashion among all the Washington politicians we should not trust. His courage and candor are admirable.

If only he weren’t a hateful, ignorant fool. Continue reading →

Integrity And Future “Madam President”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Are you excited about having Hillary as run for President yet?

hillary-clinton1From Mediaite:

During a contentious interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Clinton scolded host Terry Gross for persistently asking questions about the former Secretary of State’s “evolution” on the issue of gay marriage….Clinton publicly endorsed same-sex marriage only last year, leading many to surmise that she either withheld her true feelings on the issue all along, or had simply come around to the voting public’s increasing support for the issue. On Thursday morning, Gross attempted to understand Clinton’s change of heart, provoking a testy response.fter repeated questioning and several defensive responses, Gross told her interviewee: “I’m just trying to clarify so I can understand.”

“No, I don’t think you are trying to clarify,” Clinton fired back. “I think you’re trying to say I used to be opposed and now I’m in favor and I did it for political reasons, and that’s just flat wrong.”

She continued: “So let me just state what I feel like you are implying and repudiate it: I have a strong record, I have a great commitment to this issue, and I am proud of what I’ve done and the progress we’re making.“

What could this possibly mean? What is Clinton repudiating? That she opposed gay marriage until last year? That she said she opposed gay marriage? What is she proud of? That she only changed her mind when it was politically expedient? That she came to the conclusion that gay marriage was a human right after lots of other non-gay American—like me—had been making the point for years? Continue reading →

Texas Republicans Forfeit All Claims To Respect

/ Jack Marshall / 151 Comments

 

Old-Rotten-PlanksIt would be an Unethical Quote of the Month, if it weren’t also so stupid. As it is, the newly minted endorsement of  conversion therapy for gays in the party platform serves to remove any reason to respect the Texas Republican Party, and like a projectile vomiting episode, contaminates anyone who identifies with the GOP, not just in Texas, but anywhere.

This despicable and ignorant platform states:

“We recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.”

This was composed by bigots, enacted by fools, and adopted by intellectually lazy and mean-spirited dolts. Continue reading →

An Untrustworthy Study About Perceptions Of Untrustworthiness That Shows Something Else Entirely

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Research is frequently polluted by confirmation bias; personally, I believe this is the case more often than not. A particularly vivid example is the work on “vocal fry,” described as “slowly fluttering the vocal cords, resulting in a popping or creaking sound at the bottom of the vocal register.” Supposedly a 2011 study determined that two-thirds of college women were doing it, and now a paper by Rindy C. Anderson, Casey A. Klofstad , William J. Mayew, and Mohan Venkatachalam announces the results of further research showing how harmful it is. I admit: I’ve now read a lot of stuff about vocal fry, which I had never heard of until recently, and I’m still unclear on exactly what the hell it is, other than “talking in an annoying fashion.” The Atlantic tells us that this is vocal fry, which means it consists of talking like Zooey Deschanel does here:

Got it? OK, now you can explain it to me.

Anyway, what the exact phenomenon is doesn’t matter to the ethics issue; all you have to know is that a respected, serious, scholarly study has spawned lots of media attention by claiming that its data shows that women and men who exhibit vocal fry in their speech patterns will tend to be hired less often than job interviewees who don’t, because employers view them as untrustworthy, among other things. (The study’s catchy title is “Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market,” because, as we know, women are all that matter these days, having had war declared on them and all.) Continue reading →

Funny! But Wrong…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
"Hey! It works!"

“Hey! It works!”

Yes, I would say this was an unethical business transaction.

According to a complaint filed with Malaysia’s Public Service and Complaint Bureau, a man paid the equivalent of  $139.00 to a scamster promising to send him a device that would dramatically enlarge his penis.

When the alleged package-enhancing package arrived, it contained only…a magnifying glass.

The directions said only “Do not use in sunlight.”

Ethics observations:

  • It was very wrong to fool an idiot like that and take his money.
  • Rubbing it in with the directions was gratuitously cruel, if inspired.
  • The reporter who wrote the story undoubtedly will say that the name of the local lawyer he consulted about the case—Mr. Kok—was a coincidence, and not a cheap joke.
  • Sure it was.

________________________

Pointer: Above the Law

Source: The Star On-line

 

 

Theater Ethics: The Big Daddy Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
"Yes, why DON'T you want to make love to a young Liz Taylor, Brick? I've been wondering about that myself..."

“Yes, why DON’T you want to make love to a young Liz Taylor, Brick? I’ve been wondering about that myself…”

It is convenient when the perspectives of my longtime dual personas as a stage director and an ethicist are simultaneously relevant, so I couldn’t pass up this juicy story.

From the LGBT blog of the LA Weekly:

A Southern California production of the Tennessee Williams classic “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof” was canceled today after a homophobic outburst in the audience led to a physical confrontation, the firing of an actor, and an apparent cast revolt….the Repertory East Playhouse… announced in a statement today that the run of the play was “suspended” …as a result of “cast members leaving the show with no time to adequately re-cast their parts … “[A] man in the audience was allegedly drunk and heckling the performers during Saturday night’s performance….The heckling had been building up, …with whistling and cat-calling aimed at the character Maggie, as if the heckler and his friend “were at a strip club.”….at the moment Brick is asked why he rejected a kiss from Maggie….the heckler called out something like, “Because he’s a fag,” according to the director. At that point the actor playing Big Daddy, John Lacy, went into the audience to confront the man…”

“It was almost like he [Big Daddy] was still in character,” another actor told the LA Weekly blogger, Dennis Romero. He and a third actor then left the stage, and helped subdue the drunken audience member and his friend. Apparently the audience applauded the scene—does this remind anyone else of “My Favorite Year”?—and the play continued. Said a cast member: “The rest of the play has more resonance than ever.”

The theater fired Lacy after the show.  Anton Troy, the actor playing Brick who had been heckled, then announced on Facebook that he was quitting the production in protest, saying in part, “I will not support homophobia or an establishment that doesn’t support its talent. Hate in any form is not something I choose to subscribe to. John is a seasoned professional and an honorable man. It should never escalate to a point where the talent has to handle an unruly drunk in the audience themselves regardless of the outcome. Producers dropped the ball..”

Other actors quit the production as well, and the entire run, which was to have included a tour, was cancelled.

Wowsers.

Here are some ethics observations: Continue reading →

Hurricane Ethics: Bias, Bias, Who’s Got the Bias?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
"So 'Hurrucane Snoopy' it is, right?"

“So ‘Hurrucane Snoopy’ it is, right?”

Here we have a bias study that appears to have been infected with bias, designed to show bias, with no useful use for the data—even if it is valid, which is dubious—except to encourage bias!

Researchers  at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most deadly hurricanes, the female-named  produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities. They felt this was indicative of the fact that masculine-named storms were scarier to those in its path, so the female storms caused more death and destruction due to the trusting, sexist fools who didn’t take them seriously.

The problems with this study are legion, beginning with the fact that older hurricanes caused more damage than those of recent vintage (Katrina was left out of the study because it was deemed an outlier. It also would have blown up the data so completely that the study’s pre-cooked conclusions would be even less credible than they are.) when male names were used for the first time.  Do you think advances in medicine, storm warnings and other factors contributed to the reduction in death totals since male-named storms were introduces? Naaaah! Continue reading →

ALL ABOARD! The Elliot Rodger Ethics Train Wreck Is Leaving Rationality Station!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

trainwreck6

Wait…I think I’ve seen this wreck before!

Richard Hernandez’s enraged rant at the National Rifle Association for getting three people stabbed to death by Elliot Rodger signaled that this mass killing would  be exploited to the max by a succession of unscrupulous and/or irrational activists, social critics, and pundits, and, as my son used to say before he stopped respecting the French, “Voilà!”

The burgeoning ethics train wreck looks like it might be even more infuriating than most, though nothing, ever, will be able to top the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Express for pure, widespread, unethical lunacy. Early indications are that the usual suspects will try to wring lessons from the crazed acts of a very unusual, spectacularly deranged, unsympathetic creep as if the fair and obvious answer isn’t there for all to see who are objective and smart enough to perceive it: this one mad act proves nothing. Not about the U.S., men, not about whites, not about guns, not about law, not about Hollywood. Nothing.

It’s a big country, and there’s lots of time before climate change destroys us all or something else does first. The attack of Elliot Roger is the opposite of signature significance, an utterly meaningless convergence of factors with fewer lessons to teach than other odd but deadly events, like the Great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, or the St. Pierre Snake Invasion of 1905. He means nothing, and should be shunted aside to obscurity as quietly and quickly as possible, so his undeserved notoriety doesn’t set off differently motivated but similarly unhinged sociopaths who are teetering on the brink. Unfortunately, that would require journalists, politicians and single-issue fanatics to be fair, logical and responsible. Continue reading →