Gender and Sex

Twin Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

When I read this story in the New York Times, I checked to see what I had posted in the past regarding twin ethics and was shocked that I could find only two essays on the topic. After all, twins deliberately impersonating each other for their own benefit has been a theme from ancient Greek comedies and Shakespeare right through to “The Jackson Twins” comic strip, “The Parent Trap,” and “The Patty Duke Show.”

There was a “Columbo” episode where twins used their ability to impersonate each other to pull off the “perfect murder,” which naturally Columbo solved anyway. But just because twins switching identities can be clever, funny, effective, or cute doesn’t make it ethical.

The first of my twin ethics posts involved a twins who impersonated his brother to win $50,000 in a contest. The other one came from Brazil, where twin brothers had used their resemblance to impersonate each other and date as many women as possible, and then defend themselves from allegations they were cheating on girlfriends. These twins were ducking child support one of them owed by refusing to say which one of them had fathered a child (DNA tests proving inconclusive because they their were identical twins)  assuming they would escape having to pay. It didn’t work: a judge ordered that they both had to pay child support and that the names of both men ended up on the girl’s birth certificate.

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So….the Cardinals Couldn’t Find a Pope Who WASN’T Part of the Predator Priest Scandal? [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Good to know, don’t you think?

I’m stunned that Robert Prevost, who just became became the American pontiff, had been accused by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) of failing to act upon allegations of abuse in the U.S. and Peru. The group says that Prevost ignored allegations of sexual abuse by predator priests in Chicago after Augustinian priest Father James Ray was allowed to live at the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park despite being removed from ministering to the public over credible evidence that he had sexually abusing children. SNAP says Provost didn’t notify the heads of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic school, an elementary school half a block from the friary on the grounds that Ray was being “closely monitored.”

You know, like the Church closely monitored all of its priests to make sure they weren’t molesting altar boys.

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Comment of the Day: “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal.” There isn’t a thing I could say as an introduction that would improve on it….

***

For most of history, the idea of modesty had nothing to do with the idea that the human body or sex was evil.  The idea was that the penis and vagina, as well as the female breasts (the focus of which is the feeding of babies) were indeed focused on reproduction, life giving, holy, and thus reserved from public consumption.  Avoiding public showmanship of the reserved and holy has been a common theme throughout most cultures, religions, and peoples throughout history.  We have a time, place, and occasion for every action in our lives.  Why do we not urinate/defecate in public?  I don’t want to see you do so, and frankly, nor do I want to see your sexual characteristics.

Though this is not a phrase thought well of on this site, we do need to think of children.  There is measurable harm that occurs to children who are exposed to the sexual before puberty.  Modesty, such as not going around bare breasted, is a protection for the children.  We don’t expose sexual characteristics to protect children’s innocence.  Sure, kids know they have these parts, but for the most part, what is not in sight is not emphasized.  We focus on teaching kids about their private parts and how to avoid excess attention focused on them for their safety.  We don’t want more teen pregnancies, child sexual abuse (which includes inappropriate exposure), or normalizing sexual attraction to minors, especially in the form of pederasty, which focuses on the fully developed sexual characteristics, like breasts, that the judges seem to be suggesting we should allow to be in full display. 

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Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

You know: Minnesota.

Leaping down a particularly slippery slope, the The Minnesota Supreme Court last week overturned the conviction of Eloisa R. Plancarte for indecent exposure after she bared her breasts in a parking lot in 2021. Olmsted County prosecutors charged her with a misdemeanor after police responded to a complaint about a woman walking around topless. Judge Joseph Chase found Plancarte, 28, guilty of indecent exposure and the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Plancarte’s conviction in 2024. Now the woke Supreme Court in the Land of Lakes has reversed the conviction.

Writing for the majority, Justice Karl Procaccini wrote that Plancarte had not engaged “in any type of overt public sexual activity….the State has not met its burden of proving that Plancarte’s exposure was lewd, because none of the evidence in the record suggests that her conduct was of a sexual nature.” In her concurring opinion, Justice Sarah Hennesy wrote that criminalizing the exposure of female, but not male breasts “fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies.”

Whatever that means…

“Would a transgender man be prohibited from exposing his chest?” Hennesy continued. “What about a transgender woman who has had top surgery? Where do the chests of intersex and nonbinary persons fit within this dichotomy? And how do we treat the exposed chest of a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy? Interpreting this statutory scheme as differentiating between male and female breasts is not sufficiently clear and definite to warn Minnesotans of what conduct is punishable.”

Great. Clearly, in Minnesota the conduct of a man walking around with his naughty bits hanging out would also be deemed non-sexual. There is nothing improper about reasonable laws upholding and enforcing societal standards of decency, decorum, respect, civility and modesty. Would the result have been different if a male motorist had been distracted by the bare-breasted pedestrian and run down a child in a crosswalk? That this didn’t occur is only moral luck.

Using the Ethics Incompleteness Principle examples of transgender conduct to eviscerate the law involved is intellectually dishonest: those cases would be difficult, but would also be recognized as narrowly applicable. If Sydney Sweeney’s conduct in walking bare-breasted in a parking lot would be legitimately seen as sexual—and it would—then a law prohibiting such conduct by women generally is reasonable. The pursuit of happiness is not without borders in a civilized society that wants to stay that way.

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Pointer: Jutgory

The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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Regarding “Conclave”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As the Cardinals meet in Rome to find a new Pope for real, it is a propitious time to consider “Conclave,” the “thriller” (as Wikipedia calls it, a stretch) about a fictional conclave after the death of a fictional Pope. I had several friends recommend the film to me, and I finally watched it this week.

I’ll complete this ethics overview without spoilers since the film is relatively new, but wow, what a disappointment. Strong cast, excellent performances, brilliant production design and cinematography, but still, “Conclave” has to be one of the most wildly over-praised films I’ve seen since “Don’t Look Up!,” “The Crying Game” or “Ghost.” This overt Hollywood woke propaganda piece received eight nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, a number once reserved for all-time classics like “Ben-Hur,” “West Side Story” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” Its Best Picture nomination shows how far movie-making standards have fallen and that it won Best Adapted Screenplay is outrageous, since the screenplay was the worst aspect of the movie, predictable, over-wrought and unbelievable.

My late wife was superb at sleuthing out “surprise” endings of movies by the half-way mark or earlier; this time I felt like I was channeling her spirit because I guessed the movie’s ending (and woke propaganda mission) the second the key character showed up. I also thought, “Oh no, really? They are stooping to this?” Indeed they were.

“Conclave” is, ultimately, trivial and soap opera-ish, no better and less entertaining than the loony movie version of Dan Brown’s follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons.” Along the way to an anti-climax, we get more of the “white man bad/black man victim,” pro-LGTBQ+ proselytizing that Tinseltown has been addicted to for years.

I’ll give “Conclave” this: it was better than “Snow White” and a lot shorter than “Wicked.”

This Would Be an Ethics Quiz If I Weren’t So Sure of the Answer…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Is it ethical for the Kennedy Center to cancel its “Pride Month” productions?

Yes, it is. Next question?

Oh, let’s bat this one around for a while. The AP reports that “Organizers and the Kennedy Center have canceled a week’s worth of events celebrating LGBTQ+ rights for this summer’s World Pride festival in Washington, D.C., amid a shift in priorities and the ousting of leadership at one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions. Multiple artists and producers involved in the center’s Tapestry of Pride schedule, which had been planned for June 5 to 8, told The Associated Press that their events had been quietly canceled or moved to other venues. And in the wake of the cancellations, Washington’s Capital Pride Alliance has disassociated itself from the Kennedy Center.” The more Trump-deranged and woke “Rolling Stone” put it this way: “The Kennedy Center’s war on the performing arts continues to wage on under the Trump administration as a series of events planned around Pride Month have quietly been canceled or relocated.”

“War on the performing arts”! Nice. It’s “war” when a theater venue that is supposed to represent and entertain all Americans stops pandering to group identity and propaganda.

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The Significant Thing About The SCOTUS Oral Argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor Is That The Three Liberal Justices Were Too Biased To Recognize The Obvious…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…Which is that there are no good reasons at all to expose elementary-school-aged children to LGTBQ literature and propaganda. This is depressing. While the Supreme Court conservative Justices have shown themselves capable of ruling against extreme right-wing agenda items when the law dictates, the Three Progressive Sisters on the Court increasingly seem incapable of anything but lockstep wokism.

During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments last week regarding the case of a group of Maryland parents who sued Montgomery County (Maryland) to be able to pull their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ themes, a clear majority of the Justices indicated that they had the better argument. That is that the local school board’s refusal to give them an opt-out violates the family’s religious beliefs and therefore their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.

I find it annoying that the case has to rest on Freedom of Religion at all: why shouldn’t any parents be able to decide that they don’t want their children introduced to these topics before puberty, or exposed to indoctrination on subjects that only parents should handle, within the family?

The parents in the case include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, who are Muslim, Melissa and Chris Persak, who are Roman Catholic, and Svitlana and Jeff Roman, who are Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholic. (Having some Scientologists and Evangelical Christians would have been nice…)

In 2023, the Montgomery County School Board in one of the most Democratic counties in the nation was flushed with the Democratic Party’s totalitarian vigor, and announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using LGBTQ-themed books. The parents argued in federal court that the board’s refusal to allow them to opt their children out violated their rights under the First Amendment to freely exercise their religion, since it stripped them of their ability to instruct their children on gender and sexuality and to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues. How radical of them!

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Comment of the Day: “Oh-Oh! President Trump Violated Another Norm!”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

I confess (and it has been many months since my last confession): I was hoping to trigger this Comment of the Day or its equivalent with my criticism of the late Pope and the degree of influence and respect the position is still accorded by the news media and world leaders. Had I thought about it, esteemed commenter proe32754 would have probably been my top candidate for providing it too.

I will only point out by way of rebuttal is that Pope Francis’s Ethics Alarms dossier is a long as other prominent individuals who I have, fairly and correctly, designated Ethics Villains. Let’s see: he had four official Ethics Dunce awards and a couple more that I chose to frame differently. He has many Unethical Quotes on his record. He repeatedly presumed to meddle in the policies and politics of the United States (but his Holy predecessor during World War II refused to ever condemn Hitler’s Third Reich by name.) I have so many favorite outrages to choose from, but I think my favorite was when he dared to address Congress to pimp for the Democrats’ dream of open borders, despite severely limiting who is allowed to live in his own domain, The Vatican. Normally, anyone with a record like Pope Francis would be the star of a funeral no world leaders would dare to attend, lest they enter Cognitive Dissonance Hell with public opinion.

Yes, I suppose my remarks about the late Pope were “snide,” but I stand by them (and I do believe they were “called for.”) They were even mild compared to what I have written before; for example, here was my introduction to a post after the Pope’s visit in 2015:

I have been touched by the passionate defenses of the Pope during his visit here, by sincere believers who desperately wanted not to see what was going on. If only Pope Francis respected his supporters enough to live up to the ideals they projected on him, which included insisting, against all evidence, that he was merely talking in broad, moral generalities to Congress rather than lobbying for progressive policies, like making illegal immigration legal.

He was, we were told, only showing us where “true North” was according to the Church. I guess he just forgot to bring up abortion, which the Church regards as murder (and Joe Biden too, when he’s not playing politics) as he was lecturing our legislators about “human rights.”

The second he returned home, the Pope threw gay couples under the Popemobile, stating that Kim Davis’s position as a government official refusing to obey the law was a “right.” Again, his defenders insisted that this was just an abstraction. Now we hear from Davis’s lawyers that she had a secret meeting with Pope Francis. Davis says that he hugged her, gave her a rosary, and told her to “stay strong.”

“That was a great encouragement. Just knowing that the pope is on track with what we’re doing, it kind of validates everything to have someone of that stature,” Davis said.

Naturally, those who can’t handle the truth will say she is lying. There is no evidence that Kim Davis is untruthful, and her lawyer would be facing discipline if they falsely reported what did not occur. This really happened.

Got that, Popophiles? While a guest in this country, while progressives were tripping all over their usually Christian-mocking selves to proclaim him as a moral exemplar for setting U.S. policy, while he was being honored by the President and treated with more deference by the news media than any foreign leader, Pope Francis was surreptitiously encouraging an anti-gay zealot to defy the U.S. Supreme Court and the rule of law, while withholding the human right to be married from gay Americans.

I have already pointed out that the Pope is a hypocrite and a coward. With this conduct, he showed that he is a sneak as well, and blatantly disrespectful of the laws of the nation in which he was an honored guest. This was a breach of manners, protocol and a betrayal of trust on a massive scale.

I understand that religious faith by its very nature is an exercise in “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts,” and also that organized religion has a traditional and important role to play in maintaining civilization in a world where the vast majority of human beings won’t be civilized on their own. Thus I am not only sympathetic but in some respects encouraged by the passion and the passion and the loyalty of Catholic Church defenders like proe32754, who is obviously more articulate and capable than most.

Here is the Comment of the Day on: “Oh-Oh! President Trump Violated Another Norm!”…

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Unethical Quote of the Month, or “People Really Want to Vote For Someone Like This To Be President?”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, it’s Michelle Obama. Here’s the insufferable quote “explaining” her boycotting of the Trump inauguration, pointer to Ann Althouse, who pays attention to podcasts by celebrities like Mrs. Barack (me, I have sock drawers to keep):

“So I’m at this stage in life where I have to define my life on my terms for the first time. So what are those terms? And going to therapy just to work all that out. Like, what happened that 8 years that we were in the, the White House? What did that do to me — internally, my soul?… And going through therapy, you know, is… unlearning some of those messages that I’ve been tell… saying to myself and then trying to actively practice something different to rewire those neurons in my head…. [M]y decision to skip the inauguration… people couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason — they had to assume, that my marriage was falling apart. You know, it’s like while I’m here really trying to own my life and intentionally practice making the choice that was right for me, and it took everything in my power to not do the thing that was right or that was, was that that was perceived as right but do the thing that was right for me. That was a hard thing for me to do. I had to basically trick myself out of it. And it started with not having anything to wear. I mean, I had affirmatively — because I’m always prepared for any funeral, anything I have. I walk around with the right dress, I travel with clothes, just in case something pops off. So I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I gotta tell my team: I don’t even want to have a dress ready. Because it’s so easy to just say, let me do the right thing.”

Right…huh?

What an insufferable, narcissistic, arrested adolescent bore. She had the privilege of living in the White House and having the unearned status and honor of being treated as a national figure and icon, despite no personal achievements that warranted such celebrity other than marrying the right guy. As a former First Lady, Michelle has few obligations, but one of them is to provide a unifying example by appearing in a non-partisan role at certain traditional ceremonies and functions, a President’s inauguration being an obvious one. She has parlayed her White House stay into untold riches, and the very least she could do to earn her keep is to show up (which, as Woody Allen has pointed out, is 80% of success in life). Instead we get this New Agey empty “like” blather.