Gender and Sex

Hallmark’s Christmas Carol Ethics Misadventure

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

holiday-sweater-keepsake-ornamentTo consider this ridiculous controversy, let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start):

Here are the lyrics of the 19th Century Christmas carol “Deck the Halls,” one of the best known and most sung of the traditional carols these days because it doesn’t mention God, angels, Jesus or anything overtly religious:

Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season to be jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Don we now our gay apparel,
Fa la la, la la la, la la la.
Troll the ancient Yule tide carol,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

(There are four more verses, but these are the ones most of us know.)

You would think that nobody could get in trouble using this particular holiday song, but Kansas City-based Hallmark was equal to the challenge. It decided to change the words for one of its new holiday ornaments, designed by “Keepsake Artist,” Matt Johnson. He  designed an ornament shaped like a typically gaudy Christmas sweater  sporting the altered lyric “Don we now our Fun apparel.” The word “gay” was removed.

Hallmark, much to its surprise, was flooded with complaints, and not just on the basis of one perceived offense, but several, and contradictory ones at that:

1. How dare they mess with the lyrics of a traditional and well-loved carol?

2. This was an anti-gay decision, literally and figuratively.

3. This was political correctness, to avoid criticism from gays.

Confronted with unseasonal hate mail and threats of a boycott, Hallmark did what many corporations do in such crises. It lied. Here was its initial statement, before Hallmark surrendered and apologized with one of those ‘we didn’t mean to offend anyone’ things : Continue reading →

Can A Prostitute Be Raped?

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments
On Nov. 5, we'll find out if W.C. Fields' low opinion of Philadelphia was justified...

On Nov. 5, we’ll find out if W.C. Fields’ low opinion of Philadelphia was justified…

An unethical and incompetent judge in Philadelphia doesn’t think so, thus making a powerful argument against electing judges, being a prostitute, and living in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia Municipal Court judge Teresa Carr Deni ruled that the 2007 rape of a prostitute at gunpoint was merely “theft of services.”The  woman had agreed to meet a man have sex with him for the bargain fee of $150. He asked her if his friend could join in the fun for an additional $100, and she agreed. When these two sterling citizens arrived for the appointment, however, they held her at gunpoint and forced her to have sex with them free of charge.

If this isn’t rape when a prostitute is involved—forced, unconsented intercourse, through the threat of deadly force—then any prostitute can be raped at will, with the worst charge being “theft.” Selling sex doesn’t convert sexual battery into nothing, a non-crime, once consent for that sale is withdrawn. If you know someone is preparing to sell blood to a blood bank, and you attack him, subdue him, and drain his blood to sell yourself, is this merely theft, or a crime of violence? If he was going to be an organ donor, and you rip out his kidney, is that just theft? There is no route through law or reason that allows us to ignore the fact that a woman was forced to have sex with two men without her consent. Judge Deni clearly has a monstrous bias against prostitutes, and thus believes that they shouldn’t receive equal protection under the law. When criticized, her rationalization was that prosecuting the men for rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.” Continue reading →

The Hopelessly Muddled Ethics Of Halloween Costumes

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments
anna-rexia

“Anna Rexia”

Clearly, we need some rational ethics standards for Halloween costumes, but I doubt that we will ever have any unless political correctness is removed from the equation. The holiday is by its very nature in bad taste with a heavy dose of defiance. The tradition is all about invoking the things that frighten us, with death being tops on the list. Trivializing death or mocking it is any way is guaranteed to offend somebody. My solution: if it offends you so much, don’t participate in Halloween. Boycott it. Don’t give out candy. Let everyone else—you know, those enough to distinguish reality from make-believe and satire from insults—have a good time once a year.

Once Halloween is transformed into Halloweenie, as so many of the political correctness police would have it, it isn’t Halloween, and isn’t fun. We have properly purged the vandalism that once part of the ritual, and if every possibly offensive disguise and costume is deemed socially unacceptable, all we have left is an annual event where kids dressed in blinking lights (to avoid accidents) get non-sugar candy, fruit, dental floss or contributions to charities while dressed up as non-offensive politicians, Greenpeace captains, cartoon characters, occupations and maybe insects. Then parents x-ray the candy and limit how much of it the kids can eat. As for adults, they not only have to wear costumes that won’t offend their friends and fellow party goers, but also costumes that won’t offend somebody, somewhere, when an officious jerk at a party takes a photo with his phone and posts it for the world. What fun. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: “How You Gonna Keep Her Teaching The Class After It’s Seen Paree?”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

horrified students

…..or “It May Not Be The Naked Teacher Principle, But It May Still Be A Problem.”

In the wake of the most recent post here about the Naked Teacher Principle, Ethics Alarms received many inquiries from readers who cited the news item about the hapless teaching assistant at the University of Iowa who somehow managed to send her class not merely sexually provocative photos of herself, not merely nude photos of herself, but something much more kinky. Attached to a message that read “Hi Class, I attach the solutions for number 76 and 78 in this email” were a series of images showing the young woman sans clothes and sans inhibitions having a lively cyber-sexting chat with a partner in which the two were pleasuring themselves in front of video equipment while streaming to each other.

Hmmm. That didn’t come out quite right.

Anyway, the question was: Does this conduct, which goes well beyond the conditions of the Naked Teacher Principle but which occurred at a university rather than a high school or middle school, trigger said principle, regardless of intent?

The answer is no, not regardless of intent. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Lessons of The Colorado ‘Trans Bathroom Harassment’ Hoax

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Australian Ethics Alarms reader Zoe Brain is the site’s resident expert on transgender issues, having professional and personal experience in the field, and she pointed me to this story, which is disturbing and revealing. I know she will continue to help clarify the issues and events involved in the ongoing comment thread, but I wanted to highlight this comment, which also provides an update, as the Comment of the Day on the post, Lessons of The Colorado “Trans Bathroom Harassment” Hoax.Here’s Zoe Brain:

“A few comments –

“1) Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Fox News and others have neither retracted the story nor removed it, despite being informed that it’s false in both substance and in several technical areas. For example, this trans girl transitioned two years ago, she is not “a boy who sometimes dresses like a girl”.

“2) On the other hand, the San Jose Christian Examiner, after initially and uncritically reporting what the CBN had said (they considered it a completely reliable source) and with additional rather pungent commentary, subsequently fact-checked and retracted with apologies. They left the story up as a badge of dishonour, but prefaced it with words that did indeed amount to “WE MISLED YOU, WE WERE UNPROFESSIONAL, AND WE BEG YOUR FORGIVENESS.”. I therefore nominate them for an Ethics Hero award – section “What to do when you screw up by the numbers”.

“3) Regarding timing – Continue reading →

Lessons of The Colorado “Trans Bathroom Harassment” Hoax

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“It’s a liberal world gone mad at one Colorado high school, where the rights of one transgender student have trumped the rights of other students forced to share a bathroom. The transgender student, a male who identifies himself as a female, has sexually harassed female students in the girl’s bathroom at Florence High School, Pacific Justice Institute reported.Not only have parents’ complaints gone nowhere, but the female students have also been threatened with dismissal from athletic teams and hate crimes charges if the complaints don’t stop, according to the institute, a nonprofit religious-rights organization that was alerted by concerned parents.”

 

"Jane Doe": Victim

“Jane Doe”: Victim

This was the story breathlessly reported in various forms this month by conservative media sources, including Fox News. Apparently the sole source for the claim that “a male who identifies himself as a female, has sexually harassed female students in the girl’s bathroom” is the statement that this “allegedly occurred” in a letter to the school sent by the aggressively anti-transgender, ultra-conservative advocacy group, The Pacific Justice Institute.  The PJI has prominently opposed California’s transgender bathroom law, and it seem clear that it viewed this story as a means to an end.

In a case of the conservative media playing the old game of “Telephone,” the PJI letter suggesting that such harassment may have happened was morphed into media reports that it had happened, as Fox, the Examiner, The Blaze and others adopted the story published by the online version of British tabloid, The Daily Mail, as fact. It wasn’t fact, and the Daily Mail has quietly pulled its original story. What appears to have happened is that some virulently anti-trans parents who were livid that the school permitted a boy who self-identified as female to use the female rest rooms contacted the PJI with unsubstantiated and apparently fictional claims, in order to focus hostile attention on the school. Interviewed about the incident, the school’s superintendent flatly denied that any incidents of the kind hinted at by the PJI and reported in the media actually occurred, and to this day, no evidence has been presented that they did occur, no specifics, names, quotes or facts whatsoever, just vague allegations. One student in the school provided this perspective: Continue reading →

The Unprofessional Cause Of Unprofessional Lawyer Brian Zulberti

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Brian ZYoung Brian Zulberti may be nice guy. He may even be a competent lawyer, though the chances of his being able to demonstrate that are diminishing daily. Nevertheless, his quixotic and misguided, and dare I say it, really stupid, quest to show that professionalism, judgment and character are not properly relevant to the practice of law is an exercise in hubris that must fail, deserves to fail, and of course, will fail, leaving him to pick up the pieces of fifteen minutes of media fame purchased at the price of a reputation. It looks like he’s having fun, and that’s something, I guess. Ten years from now, I doubt that he’ll think it was worth it.

Shortly after passing the Delaware Bar, Zulberti, a 2009 law school grad,  emailed the entire Bar membership asking for a job. In lieu of his résumé;  he attached a photo of himself in a Villanova Law muscle shirt that would be more at home on a dating site for the shallow. The web also contained his half-naked selfies, and various websites with varying motives picked up the story. Interviewed on YouTube, Zulberti proclaimed that being true to himself was more important to him than getting hired, and that he wasn’t about to change his Facebook privacy settings to portray himself as a traditional, dignified, applicant for legal work.

Let me pause here to say that in many ways I sympathize with Zulberti. Continue reading →

“Hot Mom” Maria Kang Is A Self-Obsessed Narcissist, and Yes, There’s A Reason Humility Is An Ethical Virtue

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Kang

Lots of Americans are obsessed with outward appearances, unreasonably devoted to being attractive at all costs and for as long as possible,convinced that their own priorities are what everyone should embrace, and feel superior as a result. Most don’t go out of their way to broadcast these obnoxious attitudes and to accuse others of being inferior, rationalizing slugs while thrusting their cosmetic successes in the faces of those who no longer can squeeze int their fashion jeans.

Maria Kang, pictured above in all her buff glory, did, reaped the predictable result, and now is being called the aggrieved victim while she remains resolutely self-righteous.

Yechhh. Continue reading →

Annals Of The Ethics Incompleteness Theorem: The Snuggle House And “The Dress Code Effect”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Awww! Who could object to a little snuggle?

Awww! Who could object to a little snuggle?

Almost any rule, low or ethical principle can be deconstructed using what I call border anomalies. The first time I was aware of it was as a Harvard freshman in the late Sixties, when all assumptions, good and bad, useful and not, were considered inherently suspect. The college required all students to wear jackets and ties to meals at the student union, and up until my first year, nobody objected. But that fall, my classmates set out to crack the dress code, so they showed up for meals with ties, jackets, and no pants, or wearing belts as ties, or barefoot. (Yes, there were a lot of future lawyers in that class.) Pretty soon Harvard gave up, because litigating what constitutes ties, jackets and “proper dress” became ridiculously time-consuming and made the administration look petty and stupid. Of course, there are good reasons for dress codes—they are called respect, dignity, community and civility—-but never mind: the dress code couldn’t stand against those determined to destroy them by sending them down the slippery slope.

If any rules are to survive to assist society in maintaining important behavioral standards, we have to determine how we want to handle the  effects described by  the Ethics Incompleteness Theory, which holds that even the best rules and laws will be inevitably subjected to anomalous situations on their borders, regarding which strict enforcement will result in absurd or unjust results. The conservative approach to this dilemma is to strictly apply the law, rule or principle anyway, and accept the resulting bad result as a price for having consistent standards. The liberal approach is no better: it demands amending  rules to deal with the anomalies, leading to vague rules with no integrity—and even more anomalies. The best solution, in my view, is to regard the anomalies as exceptions, and to handle them fairly, reasonably and justly using basic principles of ethics, not strictly applying  the rule or law alone while leaving it intact. Continue reading →

The Naked Teacher Principle Strikes In Texas: The Playboy Variation

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
"Miss DEWEESE?? Ay Caramba!!!"

“Miss DEWEESE?? Ay Caramba!!!”

This version of the NTP is not especially close to the gray area of ethics, nor is the result surprising, though I expect a lot of teeth gnashing about it because the naked teacher in question will attract a lot of, uh, sympathy.

Dallas’s school district has apparently fired Cristy Nicole Deweese, 21, a Spanish teacher for the city’s Townview Magnet High School. Less than three years ago she posed in various provocative positions and states of undress for Playboy, in its February 2011 issue. That magazine is still available, but more to the point, the photos are easily available online. Naturally some students found them, and the core tenets of the Naked Teacher Principle had been triggered.

The Naked Teacher Principle states:

“A secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.”

I won’t keep you in unnecessary suspense. Deweese is almost dead center in the middle of the NTP. Continue reading →