Religion and Philosophy

From First Amendment Outrage to Ethics Hypothetical: The Westboro Baptist Church vs. Brandon, Miss. Hoax

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"Never mind!"

Bulletin: The story about how citizens and law enforcement personnel in Brandon, Miss. foiled the efforts of Fred Phelps’ homophobic Westboro Baptist Church to disrupt the funeral of a serviceman killed in Afghanistan never happened. The source of the hoax is unclear, but an enterprising Stars and Stripes blogger investigated and has determined that it never happened. The Church was never even in Brandon.

I detest fake web stories and the people who create them, as you probably know. The public is  confused enough by reality without having falsehoods, fabrications and hoaxes added to its database. Luckily, this is not a news site, but an ethics site, and my commentary about those who applauded this tale of a community conspiring to rob a group of their U.S. Supreme Court confirmed constitutional rights is as valid as when it was widely assumed that the story was real.

The foiling of Fred Phelps’ gang by “Mississippi Burning” tactics is not only an ethics hypothetical that most people flunked, but also an effective trap to lure the self-righteous into agreeing  that ends justify unethical means as long as the victims of those ends are sufficiently despicable.   This group includes one of the most quoted commentators on the story, who approved of the fictional response by the town and wrote,

“This is a template for how to handle the Westboro people. If lawsuits don’t work, other means will. Whatever it takes to keep them from harassing bereaved military families on the day their fallen loved ones are laid to rest.”

He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.

Ethics Dunce: Steelers Running Back Rashard Mendenhall

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Translation: "I am an Ethics Dunce."

Twitter is a wonderful invention; it used to require a blog to efficiently alert the world to one’s intellectual, logical and ethical deficiencies.  Now NFL star Rashard Mendenhall is using 140 characters to accomplish the same task, and doing a bang-up job of it, I must say.

Mendenhall has his employers, the Pittsburgh Steelers—not to mention his agent—scrambling to do damage control after the athlete emitted a series of provocative tweets in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. My personal favorite:

“What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…” Continue reading →

No, It Still Doesn’t Justify Torture

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

No.

The news of how Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed has caused a predictable outbreak of consequentialism. It appears that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided some of the key intelligence that led to the successful operation in Pakistan while he was undergoing “enhanced interrogation” in CIA prisons in Rumania and Poland. “See?” Dick Cheney’s fans are saying today. “Rendition and torture work. We wouldn’t have killed Bin Laden without them. So what do you think of those tactics now?” The opponents of torture who foolishly argued against it based on pragmatic considerations—“Torture doesn’t work!”—rather than ethical ones–-“It is absolutely wrong!“—set themselves up for this.  Now what should they say? Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Lori Palatnik

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Is "ding-dong" wrong?

“In life we must know what is good and what is evil. Yes, we are commanded to remember that there is evil in the world, and not only are we allowed to celebrate when it is destroyed, we must.”

—Mrs. Lori Palatnik, in an essay today entitled “Is It Proper To Celebrate Osama bin Laden’s Death?”

Writer David Sirotka at Salon, among others, has sharply criticized the jubilant reaction of most Americans to the terrorist’s death. He found the chanting crowds in front of the White House and Times Square disturbing, symbolizing a gleeful embrace of violence as the way to address problems, an instance of becoming the enemy in order to defeat it: Continue reading →

Colbert King, Obama Abuse, Bias and Double Standards

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Washington Post columnist Colbert King is an around-the-clock Ethics Hero, a relentless journalist investigator and critic of government corruption in Washington. D.C. He has an impeccable sense of right and wrong, as well as intolerance for public betrayal by elected officials. Yet this undeniably ethical, fair man, who eschews rationalizations at all costs while applying rigorous ethical analysis, cannot see a double standard when it is staring back at him from his own computer screen. His is a frightening tale of the power of bias.

In today’s Post, King expresses fury and pain over last week’s despicable birther drama, feelings that I share. He is revolted at the racist undertones of the “joke” photo e-mailed to friends by an Orange County Republican official as am I. He is horrified by the high percentage of Republicans polled who question Obama’s religion and national origin, as indeed he should be And without any sense of irony, King writes… Continue reading →

Colorado’s Adultery Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

Relax! It's OK...you're in Colorado!

In most states, adultery is one of the great examples of how something can be wrong and destructive without being illegal, a useful concept to have in mind when a corrupt politician or a crooked corporate executive  says “I didn’t break any laws!” It is also a good example of unethical conduct that is better controlled by ethics than law. A law against adultery is theoretically defensible as a deterrent of harmful social conduct, and the state definitely has an interest in preserving family stability. The problem is that regulating offenses triggered by love, lust and romance feels excessively intrusive to most of us. It has overtones of the Plymouth colony. For better of worse, minimizing adultery belongs in the realm of ethics, not the criminal law. Continue reading →

Don’t Cheer Mississippi’s Westboro Baptist Tactics Too Loudly: You Never Know Who Might Hear You

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

"Demonstrators? Just leave them to us."

Sgt. Jason Rogers, who was killed in action in Afghanistan, was buried two weeks ago in Brandon, Mississippi. As is its custom, the Westboro Baptist Church, fresh from U.S. Supreme Court-confirmed constitutional protection, was prepared to sully Sgt. Rogers’ funeral with its usual hateful chants about how God kills our soldiers to punish our sinful, homosexual-loving ways. Its plans were foiled, however, by a little bit of traditional Mississippi social control ingenuity.

A couple of days before the funeral, one of Fred Phelps’ vile cultists boasted about the upcoming protest while visiting a Brandon gas station, and the good citizenry on the scene gave him the sound beating they felt his sentiments warranted. Continue reading →

Why I Hate Hate Crime Laws

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Just do it with love, and they'll be lenient...

I did it to myself, I confess: reminding myself of the nation’s offensive hate crime laws while writing about the McDonald’s beating, pausing in the middle of the main theme of the post to note the foolishness of investigating whether or not an unprovoked attack qualifies as a hate crime. Hate crime laws infuriate me every time I think about them, because they represent the lowest and most cynical form of cultural values-setting by lawmaking, an important governmental task that is increasingly a lost art, because today’s lawmakers care more about posturing and power than values.

Two unidentified men beat Bryan Stow, a 42-year-old paramedic, senseless in the parking lot outside Dodger Stadium on opening day. Why? He was wearing a San Francisco Giant jersey, and it was Dodger territory. Continue reading →

The MacDonald’s Beating Video, Another Dead Canary in The Ethics Mine

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Vernon Hacket: videographer, violence afficianado, shameless bystander

Last week, In the early hours of  April 18,two teenaged patrons at a Rosedale, Maryland MacDonald’s brutally beat Chrissy Lee Polis, 22, into a seizure. The attack was captured on a video recorded by Vernon Hackett, one of the MacDonald’s workers, on a cellphone camera. Other employees can be heard laughing on the video, and Hackett apparently is heard warning the attackers that the police are coming. He has been fired by the restaurant’s proprietor.  (More on this here.)

His firing was well-deserved, but it doesn’t begin to address the disturbing implications of the incident. Continue reading →

The ACLU Gives Us a Lesson in Principles

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More

“What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?…And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide…the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”—- Sir Thomas More [Played by Paul Scofield, scripted by Robert Bolt (in a speech adapted from More’s writings) in the film of “A Man for All Seasons” (1966)]

My opinion of Rev. Terry Jones is a matter of record; to summarize, I think he is well beneath Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Tom DeLay, Goldman Sachs, Nancy Pelosi, Eliot Spitzer, AIG, Charlie Rangel , Mark Sanford, Barry Bonds, “Ronbo” and most of the other members in bad standing on the Ethics Alarms Bottom 100. Determined as he is to sully the First Amendment with his disgraceful and hate-soaked use of it, however, he is an American, and he has rights. A Dearborn, Michigan jury, prompted by the city, has taken away those rights by preventing him and another fool from protesting outside a local mosque. Continue reading →