Gender and Sex

America Is Severely Confused About Domestic Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments

John Wayne paddling his wife (Maureen O'Hara) in "McClintock!" I love ya, Duke, but this isn't funny any more....if it ever was.

Violence inflicted by one partner in a relationship upon another is absolutely unethical, yet it is one of those embedded cultural habits from the bad old days that still flourishes. Over at the Whitney Houston post, where I am being over-run by the drug-legalization zealots, sicced on me by a sad website where people indulge their dreams of legally de-braining themselves on a regular basis, there is widespread contempt for the concept  that cultural norms of what is right, wrong and worthy of shame controls our worst impulses. That contempt is as crippling as it is ignorant, for controlling behavior is what cultures do, and why they are essential. And our culture is still giving confusing signals about domestic abuse. Two recent examples: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Today Show” Co-Host Ann Curry

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

 “What about Caroline [Kennedy], who is still alive?…Did you think about, as you talk about unburdening yourself, the idea that you’ve burdened other people now with this?”

—-“Today Show” co-host Ann Curry,  interviewing Jack Kennedy mistress and teen-aged sex toy Mimi Alford on Thursday’s NBC and suggesting that Alford was wrong and greedy to share the story of how the late President used, abused, and sexually exploited her, as was his habit.

Ann Curry’s Law: “The important thing isn’t getting the true story, but to make sure to avoid telling the truth when it might upset people I like.” Got that, everyone?

That’s right, Ann…why reveal the nasty truth about the misogynistic and ruthless character of an American icon, when it is so much more pleasant to keep lies alive?

Curry is beyond belief. She is supposedly a journalist, and yet her professed concern is how Kennedy family members will react to credible information about one of their own. History, Ann? Understanding who America’s leaders are? Learning the truth? Exploding mythology burnished by a lap dog press and meticulously nurtured by a wealthy family with a well-documented history of adultery and misogyny? Do any of these seem like legitimate goals to Ann Curry? Alford, whose relationship with Kennedy has been thoroughly confirmed, was miserably treated by the sex-addicted President, and yet Curry thinks that the intern has an obligation to protect the Kennedy family. Continue reading →

In The Catholic Institutions vs Obamacare Showdown, Law and Ethics Trump Morality…And Should

/ Jack Marshall / 118 Comments

The Christian Soldiers are on the wrong side of this argument.

A controversial rule, announced last month as part of President Obama’s health-care overhaul, requires religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals to provide female employees the full range of contraceptive coverage, including contraceptives, the “morning-after pill” and sterilization services. The measure has  Catholic Church-run institutions up in arms over a system that would force them would  to offer plans that contradict their teachings. Catholic bishops have been leading the growing criticism of the rule,  distributing letters and other materials for distribution to millions of worshipers. Talk radio is abuzz with talk of Obama’s escalating “war on religion.” Even the Washington Post editorial staff criticized the move.

Naturally, the Republican-run Congress announced, via Speaker Boehner, that it would protect Freedom of Religion and block the measure with legislation. All in all, it is a spectacular collision of law, morality and ethics the likes of which we seldom see.

As for simple-minded me, I don’t think this is an especially difficult problem from an ethical point of view. Politics? Practicalities? Culture wars? Yes, those are all extremely difficult considerations in this argument, but they are also not my proper realm. The ethics are clear.

President Obama is right. Continue reading →

An Ethical, Effective, and Ironic Counter-Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Hey, thanks guys! Keep it up!

The OWS protesters could learn a thing or 2, 456 from the clever students at Missouri’s Clayton High School. You see,  protests don’t have to be obnoxious and pointless, if organizers have their wits about them and a clear objective in mind.

After Fred Phelps’ vicious, hateful, and Constitutionally-protected Westboro Baptist Church announced that it planned to take a break from disturbing family funerals for fallen American soldiers who perished for their country in order to demonstrate against Clayton High’s  Gay-Straight Alliance, the student leaders of the Alliance  organized what they call a “Phelps-a-Thon.” Donors are pledging to give money to the Gay-Straight Alliance’s human rights initiatives for every minute the Phelpsians are chanting and waiving their homophobic signs and placards.

Voila! The longer they demonstrate against gays, the more money they raise for gay rights, thus damning themselves to be slowly cut up into little shreds  by sadistic demon high-school cafeteria workers wielding dull vegetable peelers, then reassembled by cubist jokesters, and forced to watch re-runs of RuPaul’s reality show for all eternity, or whatever happens to horrid people like them in Hell.

Peaceful, effective, lucrative, pointed, simple, and funny. You can’t have a more ethical protest than that!

[Thanks to Jeff Hibbert for the tip!]

JFK, Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The new memoir by Mimi Alford, the former White House intern whom President Kennedy made his sex toy (though not his only one), hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who didn’t accept the fabricated, idealized version of JFK sold to the public by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Chris Matthews. Still, her account of Kennedy’s revolting conduct is infuriating, because it continues his corruption of American ethics and leadership standards, the real legacy of his presidency.

Kennedy was a thoroughly fraudulent human being, a cynical and arrogant leader who used soaring prose about freedom, aspiration and the human spirit while masquerading as a devoted father and husband, betraying his wife, abusing his power for selfish personal gratification, and in the process, putting his country at risk during the height of the Cold War. Only moral luck, combined with the failure of a complicit media to tell the public what they really had a right to know—that their President was a sexist, reckless, ruthless, SOB—allowed Kennedy to escape with his myth intact long enough to be regarded as a heroic figure. Now, as the truth relentlessly emerges, the product of his devoted image-makers collides with the ugliness of JFK’s behavior, creating cognitive dissonance of the most destructive sort.  After all, if the great John F. Kennedy abused drugs in the White House, used his office and power to lure employees into illicit sexual relationships, degraded and pimped-out women devoted to him, and did all of this with the full knowledge that it would bring down his administration and his party if anyone ever revealed his secrets, then this must mean that character doesn’t matter in our leaders, that we should tolerate a wide range of misconduct, and that the abuse of the power of the President is just a traditional perk. Continue reading →

A Brief Note Regarding The Supposed Difference Between Male and Female Teens Exploited For Sex By Adult Authority Figures

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"Come on! What 14-year old wouldn't enjoy being forced to submit to sodomy from her?"

I am posting this as my contribution to the epic argument on the post about Nevada’s wrist slap to the teacher who had various kinds of sex with multiple students. The gist of the dispute is whether it is appropriate to give disparate (harsher) punishment to male teachers who take advantage of female students than is given  to their female counterparts in the sexual predator world,  because “boys are different,” and are more likely to enjoy the sexual awakening without long-term adverse affects.

Yesterday’s sexual predator story (for there is indeed at least one every day, it seems) came from St. George, Utah, where a female fitness coach was sentenced after pleading  guilty  to two counts of forcible sexual abuse as part of a plea deal in which prosecutors agreed to dismiss three additional counts of forcible sexual abuse and five counts of forcible sodomy….of a 14-year-old boy she was supposed to be training.

The boy, now 16, says that he is treated completely differently in school now because of  his “experience.” Was he lucky to be made the sex toy of a hot adult fitness coach? It doesn’t sound like he thinks so. Nonetheless, the woman told the boy, “Well, you learned a whole lot, didn’t you?’ in a secretly taped conversation in which she tried to talk him out of helping prosecutors.

You see?  The attitude being advocated in the comments encourages and rationalizes the actions of female predators.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation-Planned Parenthood Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Unlike the 26 U.S. Senators who are unethically abusing their positions by presuming to demand that an independent non profit organization expend its funds according to their interests, I am not going to tell the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation how to pursue its mission…because as with the Senators, it is none of my business. Ethics is my business, and the full-blown ethics train wreck surrounding the Foundation’s decision to end its substantial financial support of Planned Parenthood has been created by dishonesty, misrepresentation and a lack of fairness from all directions.

Here are some unpopular ethics truths in this fiasco. Continue reading →

Scylla and Charybdis in the Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is Scylla. Charybdis is in the teachers lounge.

Responding to one of the recent posts here about the deteriorating relationships between students, teachers and administrator, teacher Brook Styler alerted us to his own crisis, a situation right out of “The Children’s Hour” in which vengeful female students, aided and abetted by parents, circulated rumors that lost him his job.

Styler has launched a website, Teacher Hunt, to collect the experiences of teachers, who, like him, have been victimized by false accusations from students. I plan on visiting it often. But the site appears at a time in which teachers using their students for sexual gratification is either on the rise, or is being uncovered with remarkable efficiency. Every day, one or more cases of teachers preying on students is in the news. Yesterday, it was Rachel L. Farrell, 25, a  Bangor, Maine  high school teacher  charged with having sex with a 17-year-old student on “numerous occasions” while she was supposed to be tutoring him in English. Authorities believe she had sexual relations with as many as three other students. Today, it was the still unfolding horror of Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in the Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone, who was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children after over 400 photos were discovered by a CVS clerk, showing pornographic conduct involving his students (age 7-10) over a five year period. Berndt, now being held on $23 million bail, regularly told his students that they were going to play a “tasting game,” in which children were blindfolded and, in some cases, gagged with tape, authorities say. They were then fed the teacher’s semen, administered to them on a blue plastic spoon and, according to one alleged victim’s father, on cookies.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, can you? Continue reading →

Incomprehensible Nevada Justice For A Sexual Predator

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Pop quiz: Can you guess the sentence for this criminal?

Hey! Let's show some compassion for these sexual predators, people!

Bethyl Shepherd, a 35-year old high school teacher,was

  • convicted of having various forms of sexual relations with seven of her male students. In addition…
  • The boys ranged were as young as 15.

She got 60 days in jail, with the rest suspended.

I detect in the country a progressive deterioration of rational attitudes toward official punishment, and this case is an unnerving example. The news story makes it clear that everyone, including prosecutors and the parents of the boys, wanted leniency for Shepherd, and no jail time. The judge rejected their misguided pleas, but just barely.

Why so little punishment? Well, this is Nevada, where the attitude toward dubious sexual relationships is uniquely tolerant. Nevertheless, Shepherd is a sexual predator who exploited the trust of students and their parents for her own sexual gratification. This was not one foolish teacher-student crush, as in other cases that have sent teachers like Mary Kay Le Tourneau into prison for long periods. It appears that much of the sympathy for Shepherd stemmed from defense testimony that she was bi-polar and that this affected her judgment (let’s see how far Jerry Sandusky gets with that strategy) and the fact that her life has spun out of control as a result of her arrest, as she has lost her job, her career, her husband, her children, and has had to sell her car. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: Ethics Blindness at Joe Pa’s Memorial Service

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Paterno's inaction: bliviousness...or willful blindness?

In the ongoing debate among Joe Paterno sympathizers (and I don’t mean that pejoratively) and those who believe the late Penn State icon failed his ethical obligations miserably and deserved all the criticism he received, several interesting themes have arisen, including whether “obliviousness” is an excuse, whether critics are engaging in “wahlberging”–that is, claiming that they would have handled a difficult situation better when it costs them nothing to make the claim—and whether the Sandusky incident should be permitted to cloud Paterno’s legacy at Penn State, or should be over-shadowed by it. In this Comment of the Day, Proam covers these topics in response to a commenter who wrote, “Other posters who have tried to in any way justify Paterno’s actions/lack of action – GET REAL!”  Here is his comment, to the post, “Ethics Blindness at Joe Pa’s Memorial Service.” I’ll have some reactions at the end. Continue reading →