Rights

Banning Thoughts, Positions and Ideas in Higher Education Is Unethical and Unconstitutional….But Is Cultural and Values Surrender the Only Alternative?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Greg Lukianoff is the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has taken over the non-partisan role of First Amendment protector that the ACLU abandoned over a decade ago. In an essay for the New York Times titled, “This Is No Way to Run a University” (gift link), he easily smashes some low hanging conservative fruit: Texas A&M University introducing policy changes aimed at a sweeping review of course materials aimed at purging state disapproved assertions about about race and gender ( according to a bill passed last spring by the Texas Legislature) from woke curricula.

The bill is almost certainly unconstitutional as state forbidden speech. Lukianoff highlights the fact that the law was interpreted at Texas A&M as mandating the elimination of some Plato works from a philosophy course on how classical ethical concepts apply to contemporary social problems, including race and gender. That is clearly a ridiculous result. The free speech activist writes in part,

“Texas A&M seems to have concluded that the safest way to handle the ideas contained in a classic text is to bury them. This is no way to run an institution of higher education. University administrators and state lawmakers are saying, in effect, that academic freedom won’t protect you if you teach ideas they don’t like. Never mind that decades ago, the Supreme Court described classrooms as the very embodiment of the “marketplace of ideas”: “Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom…Within the Texas Tech University system, which has more than 60,000 students, a Dec. 1 memo warned faculty members not to “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain specific viewpoints about race and sex in the classroom. These include concepts like “One race or sex is inherently superior to another”; “An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”; and “Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or constructs of oppression.” The point isn’t that these concepts should just be accepted or go unchallenged; it’s that challenging them through a robust give-and-take is what universities are for.”

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It’s Time To Play That Exciting Game Show, “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Hello everybody! I’m your ethics game show host Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”,” the popular ethics game show where our contestants try to decide whether clearly unethical conduct is worth only a shrug and a giggle, or is serious enough to try to stop.

Here’s our special guest, Touchy McCrankface, with the problem he encountered recently…

“Hello, panel. My name is is Touchy McCrankface. For some reason I am still a Facebook user despite that platform banning my favorite blog Ethics Alarms for almost two years because one of their censors decided that it was racist to even discuss the topic of blackface’s appearance in some classic movies. When a Facebook friend  I actually care about has allowed his or her birthday to be announced on Facebook, I will sometimes, as I am prompted, wish that friend a “Happy Birthday.”

“I do not use the stupid and juvenile pre-programmed emojis Facebook tries to stick on my message, the little cakes, candles and party hats. Recently I sent just such a birthday message to an old friend. Let’s call him “Mike.”

After I sent my “Happy Birthday”,  Facebook sent me the equivalent of a receipt. I have no idea why. Maybe it has always done this, but I’ve never noticed one before, or if I have, I never bothered to read one. The message to me read,

“You wished Michael XXXXX a happy birthday on their profile.”

This, frankly, ticked me off. First of all, I knew that. But most of all, I don’t use the pronouns “they” and “their” for single individuals, as in “non-conjoined twins.” If you seem to be male to me, I will use the pronouns “You/he/him. If you seem to be female, I will use “You/she/her.” If I can’t tell, I won’t use any pronoun, constructing a sentence so that “misgendering” isn’t necessary, since men and boys don’t typically like being mistaken for women and girls, and vice-versa. If someone informs me that “he” wants to be refereed to as “she,” that’s fine: I aim to please. Similarly with 250 pound bearded bald guys who want to be called “she.” I’ll call you a pangolin or an Archaeopteryx if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t try to make me eat insects or worms with you. (Archaeopteryx is described as an “early bird,” and as we all know, the early bird catches the worm.)

But I will NOT agree to utter a grammatical monstrosity by using a plural pronoun in reference to one individual. And if you tell me you haven’t decided on your gender, or that it switches back and forth without warning, I will respond, most politely, “Please let me know when you make up your mind or get psychiatric help. Until then, you’ll be “him” or “her” to me.

But back to Facebook….My friend Mike has been married trice, has two grown kids and is as male and heterosexual, as well as unambiguously so, as anyone I have ever met. Who or what is Facebook to impose a plural pronoun on him, or to suggest that it is appropriate to do so in either his case or anyone’s case? 

I view this as subtle cultural indoctrination regarding a societal practice that is at best a stupid fad and at worst ‘grooming’.” 

Thanks, Touchy! Before I throw the challenge over to you, contestants, let me ask our resident ethicist, Jack Marshall, about Touchy’s dilemma. Jack, is this worth bitching about?

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Compelled Speech, Trick or Treat, and Sex Offenders

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A Missouri statute stated:

“Any person required to register as a sexual offender … shall be required on October thirty-first of each year to: Avoid all Halloween-related contact with children; Remain inside his or her residence between the hours of 5 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. unless required to be elsewhere for just cause, including but not limited to employment or medical emergencies; Post a sign at his or her residence stating, “No candy or treats at this residence”; Leave all outside residential lighting off during the evening hours after 5 p.m.“

Sanderson v. Hanaway, decided yesterday by Eighth Circuit Judge Jane Kelly and joined by Judges James Loken and Ralph Erickson, struck down the part of the law that required the sign as “compelled speech,” a First Amendment violation. Using the “strict scrutiny” test that requires a compelling state interest and a provision that is “narrowly structured” to minimize the burden on individual rights, the Court found the mandatory sign provision unnecessary and unreasonable given the law’s other requirements.

I agree. The sign mandate amounted to a required “I am a registered sex offender” declaration. On Halloween, that kind of message is likely to attract a lot worse “tricks” than toilet paper on some trees. Ethics Alarms has visited this issue repeatedly, most recently in May of 2025, but the harassment and persecution of sex offenders already raises serious ethical questions, including “pre-crime.” The whole law seems like gratuitous virtue-signaling using an already persecuted group as a cheap target. The rest of the law, however, was upheld.

An amusing note on the Trump Derangement front: even a legal report on a Missouri Halloween law managed to be twisted into a justification for an anti-Trump slap. “This is good news for Trump, but it would have been hilarious to see him forced to put that sign outside of the White House,” writes a commenter at The Volokh Conspiracy.

What assholes these people are….

Unethical Quote of the Year (2026): New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

—New New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his speech yesterday to too many ignorant voters who have no idea what he’s talking about and what they are in for.

Choosing that “Bananas” clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive was too easy; not only is it one of my favorites, but other pundits and social media wags has already made the connection to Woody’s Allen’s fictional South American country of San Marcos. And Mamdani’s open embrace of communism in that sentence was, indeed, bananas. I am sorely tempted to just leave the post at that: it’s res ipsa loguitur. It speaks for itself.

Yet it doesn’t speak for itself: that’s the scary part. That is what our education system’s collapse into incompetence and indoctrination has brought us. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason.” The average American not nearing retirement age is likely to say, upon hearing Mamdani’s seductive threat, “Collectivism! Sounds good to me!” as well as “Who’s Santayana?”

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Remembering “Lynch v. Donnelly,” When SCOTUS Saved Public Manger Scenes With “The Reindeer Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Before you make a public statement that will guarantee that you will become a poster-mayor for the usual “War on Christmas” battles, it might be wise to check legal history regardless of which position you take.

Mayor Miko Pickett, the “historic” first black mayor of Mullins, South Carolina, ordered this season’s Nativity scene removed from a public parking lot due to “separation of church and state.” The town happily ignored her. Not surprisingly, she had based her decision on “diversity” and “inclusion” principles and the “separation of Church and State.”

Naturally, she opted for the politically correct “Happy Holidays.” But the mayor may have had a point.

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Holly Mathnerd Is Right that Effective Gun Control Is Impossible Without Govt. Gun Confiscation by Force, But Doesn’t Everyone Know That?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.

Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.

Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

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Larry Bushart, Justin Carter, Josh Pillault: Martyrs To Anti-Gun Fearmongering and School Shooting Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has a guest column in the New York Times about the unethical persecution of Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. Lukianoff uses his column to condemn all negative consequences of all of those comments, usually by the Trump Deranged and Axis media-indoctrinated.

From the column:

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations.

The Bushart case is a poor one to send Lukianoff to his soapbox: he wasn’t arrested over what he said about Kirk. I don’t think he was fired, either, since the column begins by telling us he is retired. Moreover, FIRE’s absolutism is misplaced: there are very good reasons to fire teachers who celebrated a man’s death by violence for his political views. To begin with, they are terrible, hateful leftists who shouldn’t be corrupting young minds.

But the column did remind me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

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Ethics Observations on “Seditious” Video’s Unethical Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Pentagon has announced that it is investigating Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona regarding possible breaches of military law when the former Navy pilot joined other Democrats in the recent video calling for troops to defy “illegal orders.” A federal law allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the Secretary of War for possible courts martial. Kelly’s statements in the video may have interfered with the “loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces…A thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the statement said.

Ethics Alarms already explained what was unethical about the video. It was a cheap political stunt, unethically implying that what had not occurred and will not occur had occurred or was in danger of occurring. It was clever, Machiavellian and, as the late Harry Reid would say, “It worked!” The stunt lured Trump into behaving like an ass, overstating the issues involved, and giving the Axis more metaphorical sticks to beat him with. Even with the admissions by some of Kelly’s co-conspirators that they didn’t know of any illegal orders by Trump that justified the “public service announcement,” it still was a net public relations loss for the President, who doesn’t need any more of them. Now Pete Hegseth is joining the botch. Terrific.

Observations:
1. Haven’t Republicans heard of the Streisand Effect? Making such a fuss over the video is just guaranteeing that it stays in the news, along with the typically biased and inflammatory news coverage, like “Trump calls for EXECUTION of members of Congress!” Hegseth’s investigation could be justified, but with an irresponsible and partisan news media, there is no chance, none, that the public will understand the issues involved. With those as the conditions that prevail, the announcement of the investigation is incompetent.

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Ethics Dunces: 98 Democratic Party House Members

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One would think that a Congressional resolution calling for the condemnation of communism and socialism would be an easy one to vote for, but one would be wrong. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), the daughter of Cuban refugees, introduced a non-binding resolution to Congress this past week called “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” Most of the historical villains referenced in the resolution —Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolás Maduro—were Communists. Nevertheless, not only did 100 members of the Democratic Party vote against a statement of principles that flows directly from our founding documents and core values (Jefferson wrote, “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it,” and Madison added that it “is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest…), they were confident enough of the effectiveness their party’s pro-socialist propaganda to go on the record as opposing that statement. All the worst villains are there: the “Squad,” Pelosi, Jaimie Raskin, Maxine Waters.

The number of Democrats unwilling to condemn socialism, and therefore its nasty offspring communism, was even more damning: in addition to the 98 naysayers, two Democrats voted “present” and 47 weenies refuse to vote at all.

Democrats are now telling us exactly who they are and what their agenda is.

WaPo: “Republican Overseeing Alamo Renovation Ousted After ‘Woke’ Social Media Post” Ethics Alarms: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.

Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.

This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…

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