The husband of the President of Finland is being widely ridiculed in the news media after being caught by a journalist’s camera as he plainly ogled the cleavage of Princess Mary of Denmark and was seemingly caught in the act by the Princess as well. Unfair. He allowed his gaze to linger a bit long, perhaps, and one’s manners are supposed to be somewhat elevated, theoretically, in the presence of royalty, but Pentti Arajarvi was mostly a victim of the sad reality that being discrete, once the primary etiquette requirement of men relentlessly drawn to a woman’s comely assets, is no longer possible in public and often in private as well. President Obama, you will recall, was caught doing a classic male turnaround to catch the spectacle of a perfect female butt passing by.
Even more unfair, and ridiculous, are the opportunistic women’s rights warriors who use such incidents to show how women are still treated as sex objects by men in the workplace and elsewhere. Continue reading →
Every picture I could find to illustrate this story was offensive, so here's a bald guy with a dog on his head.
Combine the comments I’m getting from the “cannibelles” launched at Ethics Alarms from the “Wisconsin Sickness” website (“Personal conduct has no bearing on professional trustworthiness!“), and add the film negative of the recently posted Ethics Hero, the selfless pastor, add some eye of newt, and ABRACADABRA! You get…. Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, whose pastor, Darrell Gilyard, is a registered sex offender!
And of recent vintage, too. This apparently doesn’t faze the good parishioners of Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist because—well. pick your rationalization…I’m sure they have:
“There but the grace of God go I!”
“Everybody deserves one mistake!”
“Let Him who is without sin cast the first stone!”
“Who are we to judge?”
“It’s not like he killed someone!”
“What he does in his private life is nobody’s business!”
Look at the Catholics! At least our pastor molests girls!
“Christians believe in redemption!”
“It doesn’t matter: he’s an excellent preacher!”
Gilyard’s last church wasn’t so understanding, but then it was that congregation’s underage girls who he pleaded guilty to molesting in 2009. You can’t blame them too much for being intolerant.
But his new church is being reasonable about this as well as broad-minded; they are taking the responsible course. Children aren’t allowed in church while Gilyard is preaching.
"Happy 98th birthday, Mom! Now get the hell out of my house."
Perhaps it is not fair to compare 71-year-old Peter Kantorowski to King Lear’s heartless daughters Regan and Gonoril. After all, Peter says that his 98-year-old mom, Mary, is welcome to stay with him and his wife at their home, but she refuses. Still, Kanterowski, like the Lear girls, is trying to evict an aged parent from her residence after she had signed the property over to him. And even Regan and Goneril didn’t serve their father the King with an eviction notice on his birthday…but that’s what Peter’s gift was to his mother last December.
According to Probate Court records, in 1996 Mary Kantorowski and her husband, John transferred their small, yellow Cape Cod-style house to a trust administered by eldest son Peter on the condition that Mary could live there until her death, and that upon her death the house would go to Peter and his younger brother, Jack. In July of 2005, Peter quitclaimed the house from that trust to another he and his wife set up, giving him ownership, he says, without the prior conditions. A retired taxidermist, Kantorowski swears he is trying to evict his mother from the home she has lived in since 1953 for her own good. “She would be better off living with people her own age,” he told the Connecticut Post.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ordered New Jersey’s flags flown at half-staff in official mourning for Whitney Houston, and a lot of people are outraged. The critics of the honor fall into two categories: those who believe that the honor should be reserved for military heroes and high government officials, and those who believe that Houston is especially unworthy because of her well-documented substance abuse problems.
For his part, Governor Christie defiantly declares that Houston, as a daughter of New Jersey, deserves the state honor because of her contributions to the culture.
Technically and officially, Christie is out of line. Federal law is very specific about the proper treatment of the flag, including when it can be flown at half-staff. Simply put, celebrities don’t qualify, no matter who they are. A state governor can proclaim that the flag be flown at half-staff in his or her state for fallen soldiers, but not for non-military individuals. But governors ignore the law routinely, and have for decades. Tennessee’s governor lowered the flag when Elvis died. Massachusetts did the same for Red Sox great Ted Williams, though he was also a war hero, so no one was going to object. The law, in terms of custom and enforcement, is a dead letter, and probably should be.
True, some governors have abused the spirit of the law, including Christie, when he lowered the flag for Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—a great musician, but hardly a figure of transcendent national significance. If 4 USC Section 7 isn’t going to be followed or enforced, then we need some new standards, or before we know it they’ll be lowering the flag for Joan Rivers. Continue reading →
"How do you plead, Judge Ballentine?" "I'm innocent, Judge Ballentine!" "I find you credible. Case dismissed, Judge Balentine! See you in the mirror!"
Judge Kelly S. Ballentine, a Pennsylvania district court judge, apparently avoided paying $268.50 in parking tickets by dismissing her own cases. Two of the three tickets issued to her were for overtime parking, and the other was for an expired registration. She has been charged with tampering with public records, obstructing the administration of law and participating in activities that are prohibited due to a conflict of interest.
Yes, I’d say that was a fair assessment of the situation.
Ethics Alarms thanks the ABA Journal for the story.
Robert Stack as Eliot Ness with the rest of TV's "The Untouchables." Now THOSE guys were professional. You'd never see THEM text messaging jokes to Al Capone...
The Washington Post ran a story Tuesday describing how the defendants in an elaborate FBI sting operation escaped conviction as a consequence of the revelation of racy text messages between the agents and their undercover informant. Agents and their key informant bantered “about sex, booty calls, prostitutes, cigars, the Village People, the informant’s wives and an agent’s girlfriend.” When the arrests were first announced by the Justice Department, the operation was regarded as a model law enforcement success. But federal prosecutors failed to win a single conviction, in large part because defense lawyers used the text messages to raise juror doubts about the credibility and professionalism of FBI agents. Now the Justice Department says that in light of the first two trials, the government is evaluating “whether to continue to go forward” with the remaining prosecutions of 16 defendants, seven of whom had their cases end in hung juries.
During the most recent trial of six men and women on charges of paying bribes to win business with a foreign government, the defense attorney used the FBI’s texts both to attack the character of the informant and to suggest that the lead agent was an untrustworthy, bigoted, anti-gay misogynist. The FBI believes this was unfair, and an example of a lawyer’s trick defeating justice. Informants, almost without exception, are sleazy characters, and managing them takes skill and guile. The agents felt it was essential to build trust, which meant working to develop a collegial relationship, at least in the informant’s mind. The text banter, they say, was designed to ensure the loyalty of a low-life, which required the agents to sometimes act like low-lifes themselves. Thus they texted messages back and forth that included bawdy jokes, innuendos about sex, anti-gay stereotypes and more, all in a buddy-buddy tone that the jury found troubling. “The texts were one of many things that point to an absolutely amateurish operation,” the jury foreman told the Post. Continue reading →
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 →
Jedi Emeritus George Lucas betrayed a warped concept of cowboy ethics, self-defense and ethics generally in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview in which he was quizzed about his technological fixes on the original Star Wars trilogy. The topic was the shooting of Greedo in the bar, when Han Solo blasts away at the green, fishy porcupine-like villain, who has a gun pointed at him:
Lucas:Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
Lucas’s idea of what constitutes a “cold-blooded killer” runs counter to law, common sense, and ethics. Continue reading →
The societal approval pendulum has swung so far away from physically punishing children that a formal spanking risks an accusation of child abuse. The Hawaii Supreme Court, in the case of Hamilton ex rel. Lethem v. Lethem, in which a retraining order was issued against a father accused of abusing his 15-year-old daughter, pronounced guidelines for determining what constitutes reasonable and moderate corporal punishment of a child by a parent, ruling that such punishment is reasonable (and a Constitutional right ) when..
“…the parent’s discipline is reasonably related to the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the minor,”
The punishment properly takes into account the nature of the misbehavior,
Whitney Houston, she of the musical gift we may see only once in a lifetime, is dead at 48. There has been no final determination, but there is little doubt: drugs killed her.
Houston, they say, and I have no reason to doubt it, was troubled by the pressures of show business, celebrity and stardom, and with a little help from her dead-beat, abusive husband, singer Bobby Brown, sought to relieve the stress with a variety of illegal substances, including cocaine. Over the past 15 years or so, Americans have been able to watch the relentless deterioration of Houston, once the epitome of a beautiful, intelligent, ebullient and charismatic presence, into an emaciated, ruined shell with only a hint of the glorious instrument that once, in the middle of a war abroad, delivered the most stirring rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner I have ever heard, or ever will hear.
This happened to Whitney Houston because when illegal drugs were among the options she could have chosen to accept or reject as a way to get through difficult days and troubled times, she did not have the instant reaction, hard-wired in her brain, that has to stop all of us from doing terrible, dangerous, irresponsible and anti-social things. There can be little doubt that some theoretical options would have triggered that reaction. They would be the options that did not seem like options at all, because the culture Whitney Houston lived in was unequivocal and unshakable in its verdict, a verdict virtually all members of that culture naturally adopted and accepted—because that’s what cultures do. And when that option presented itself, Whitney Houston, like the culture she was a part of, would have said “No.”
That she didn’t say no to drugs, and is dead because of it, was the direct result of an American culture that does not give its constituency a clear message and verdict. Instead, the clearest and most unequivocal signal from the culture, the fact that recreational drugs are illegal and that America enforces the laws against them, is progressively weakened by ridicule, attack, popular culture, and the defiance or hypocrisy of role models and public figures. Incredibly, though the deaths by drug-abuse among the tiny proportion of the world that is famous and talented—Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Whitney—should make it obvious how massive the number of anonymous victims of drug abuse there must be, the destructive refrains grow louder: Legalize drugs! End the War on Drugs! And those calls weaken the cultural resolve further. Actually doing what they advocate would cripple it….and that day might come.
Whether they are preventing the culture from rejecting drug use because enforcement is expensive, or because they have a relative or friend in prison for drug-dealing; whether they are calling for legalization because they are libertarians and academics or Ron Paul, or because they are public officials who see a new revenue source; whether they are longing for the halcyon days of Haight-Ashbury and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, or just like getting stoned, these are the people whose advocacy continues to nurture a competing culture that killed Whitney Houston, as surely as if she had been shot her between the eyes.
I would say that if their insistence on legalization is followed, and the nation’s laws join the popular throng in pronouncing addictive and life-destroying drugs as legitimate “options,” many more like her will die….except there aren’t many more like her. But there are countless lives to destroy, and unimaginable losses to families, businesses and America to be endured.
I just watched the video of Whitney Houston’s glorious performance of our National Anthem at the Super Bowl, before the drugs had finished their work. She radiates confidence, strength and character, as well as that special joy that the fortunate few with magical gifts have. She brings a stadium full of Americans to their feet in cheers, with an exhibition of artistry that will continue to inspire forever. Drugs took all of that away, from Whitney Houston and from us.
Because our culture could not say no with enough conviction to save her.
Update (2/15/12): With some regret, I am closing comments on this post. Too many commenters refused to discuss the issue it was intended to raise, which was how cultural approval and disapproval of conduct is more powerful, ultimately, than the law in establishing standards. I have committed on this blog to responding to as many comments as possible, but the onslaught of pro-drug zealots whose tactic was to keep repeating the same arguments no matter how many times I gave my response led me into too many frustrated responses, too many nasty exchanges, and too many hasty replies that I wish I had stated more clearly. For those I apologize, both to the visitors involved and other readers. I also apologize for ending the discussion here, but I don’t have the time to monitor it. You are welcome to e-mail me personally.
Ethics Alarms 