I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of the mouth-foaming anti-Supreme Court rants from people who can’t mount any kind of a coherent legal or ethical argument. The absurd attempts to compare the earlier Bruen ruling on gun rights and Dobbs were particularly forced, but then so are the claims that Dobbs is based on Catholic theology [See Seth Tillman’s neat debunking of a Columbia prof on this silly assertion here…] and that the opinion portends the banning of birth control. I found it particularly disheartening that a smart, usually rational lawyer friend echoed back those MSNBC talking points. I know she watches the shameless leftist-propaganda network, but assumed that she had the brains and integrity to know when she was being fed garbage. I guess not. Scary.

Meanwhile, I have been surprised to see how so many of the media defenders of abortion so quickly defaulted to ugly, transparently unethical (and immoral) reasoning. On HLN, for example, a special report cautioned that states ending the wholesale slaughter of the unborn would face serious economic hardships as scores of women had to deal with unwanted pregnancies, keeping them out of the workplace. I am beginning to believe that an unexpected salutary result of Roe’s fall, which I was not expecting or in favor of, may be that a larger proportion of the public will realize just how brutal, callous and unethical the “pro-choice” movement is and has been all along.

Remember, abortion isn’t an ethics conflict, in which there are two strong ethical values pulling in opposite directions. It’s an ethical dilemma, with a powerful, indeed the most powerful, ethical consideration—life—is being opposed by non-ethical considerations like convenience, ambition, avoidance of unpleasant consequences and finance. The pro-abortion movement, some of it anyway, understands that, and also understands that framed as a an ethics dilemma, their position is a loser. Thus it has pretended that the life side of the issue doesn’t exist. It’s amazing that they got away with this deception for so long, but in the desperate efforts to justify their outrage, they are only revealing their lack of respect for human life for all to see.

1. Why does anyone pay attention to this woman? Writer, pundit and progressive activist Saira Rao tweeted, “This country is a racist transphobic homophobic xenophobic ableist classist Islamophobic misogynistic dumpster fire. As such, seeing the American flag makes me want to vomit.” The statement is an expression of hate only, and deliberately insults not only the nation of her birth but also every normal American who is justly proud on the nation, its history and culture. One of the benefits of the U.S. is that you can say or write offensive stuff like that, but if your perception, values and judgment is that poor, I don’t care what you think. You’re untrustworthy and incompetent. Continue reading →

As Ethics Alarms has stated many times, any individual, official, politician, pundit, journalist, celebrity or organization that abuses its public trust and engages in unethical and destructive conduct when their statements make the public more ignorant than it already is, and it already is too ignorant to competently participate in a democracy.

Welcome to the BET Awards!

The hostess of last night’s televised festivities (of a racially exclusive awards show that makes pronouncements about equality and civil rights), Taraj Henson, got things off to an irresponsible start by saying, with the ‘I’m pissed off and certain I am right though I have no clue what I’m ranting about’ expression on her face you see above by saying,

“It’s about damn time we talk about the fact that guns have more rights than a woman. It’s a sad day in America. A weapon that can take lives has more power than a woman who can give life, if she chooses to.”

This is being called a “powerful statement” this morning, on CNN’s HLN among other places. Stupid statements are not powerful. It is not a fact that guns have more rights than women: inanimate objects have no rights. Henson is making declarations about rights when she doesn’t understand what a right is. Weapons don’t take lives: they have no agency or autonomy. People take lives. Unlike “guns,” abortion is an act performed by people, and that act has taken far, far more lives in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade was written than people firing guns have. No laws in any states either require women to “give life” or prevents them from doing so. The laws at issue do limit the extent to which a women, having created human life, can unilaterally end it when she “chooses to.”

Misleading, inarticulate, hyperbolic and intellectually muddled pronouncements like Henson’s do no good whatsoever, and a lot of harm by making intelligent debate impossible.

Others were similarly adamant and destructive.

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Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss’s chief of staff was caught by Capitol police defacing posters outside of the offices of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene back in March. Timothy Hysom, a  veteran Democrat congressional staffer who worked for Rep. Adam Schiff before becoming Auchincloss’s top aide, was caught on  hidden camera security footage defacing Greene’s posters with stickers. As far as I can tell, he did not draw mustaches on pictures of her face.

Police  believed Hysom was involved in seven poster attacks outside Greene’s office in the Longworth House Office Building between January and March. The aide, who is 51-years-old, refused to cooperate with police when confronted.

Auchincloss’ spokesperson, spokesman Matt Corridoni, justified his colleague’s  violation of  DC Code § 22–3312.01 Defacing Public or Private Property” by saying that the real victims were people “forced to read” Greene’s posters stating that male and female are only two genders, and calling such a message “bullying.”

Some conservative commentators are making a major issue out of the fact that “the same U.S. Attorney’s office that pursued the Jan. 6 defendants declined to approve an arrest warrant” for Hysom, proving a double standard. This misses the real ethics point by the proverbial country mile. Continue reading →

The Sunday Times features this piece: “The Voices of Men Affected by Abortion.”

The feature is presented as if it does and should provide further illumination on whether abortion is a “right” or not. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t. “Men really need to consider what losing access to safe and legal abortion means for them,” the Times quotes Joe Colon-Uvalles, an organizer at the abortion rights group Planned Parenthood, by way of an introduction. That’s your smoking gun: the Times wants to increase male outrage over Dobbs.

Yet how men “feel” about losing the option of abortion for women they impregnate (in the states that ban abortion) is ethically and legally irrelevant. So, in fact, is how women “feel” about it. The news media and the abortion-happy Left want to frame the controversy as being about what women want, their “choices.” What matters, however, and where any productive, ethical and honest discussion must settle, is whether the Constitution guarantees a right to snuff out an unborn human life—it doesn’t—and whether what a woman or a man wants can ever justify choosing to end the life of a human individual that would otherwise become a living, breathing citizen.

The hysterics, the propagandists, the fearmongerers and the liars depend on keeping the public’s attention away from the fact, and it is a fact, that there is a human life path ended in every abortion. For decades, the convenient myth has been that the only life involved in an abortion is the potential mother’s. Now the Times is saying, “Hey, wait a minute. There’s a second life involved! The father’s!”

Clever. Deceptive, cynical, despicable, and designed to distract from the real issues…but clever.

Ever have one of those days when you lost all control over your schedule, plans and agenda and there was nothing you could do about it? Yesterday was that way for me. I’m sorry. The last post here went up before 9 am yesterday, and by the time al the metaphorical alligators had stopped nibbling on me, I just couldn’t find the energy or enthusiasm to even go back into the ProEthics offices, much less clear my brain and get out a post or two.

It was so bad that I failed to mention “Custer’s Last Stand,” one of my favorite rich ethics, leadership and life lessons from American history. The 25th is the anniversary of the massacre, in 1876; the anniversary of Custer’s greatest moment is coming up in about a week, and maybe I won’t be such a worthless slug then. I can hope.

My sincere thanks to the small group of diligent commenters who kept the home fires burning yesterday.

On to the Freakout…

1. Warming up slowly: Pseudo woke, recently perceptive aspiring truth-teller Andrew Sullivan issued a clunker of a reaction to the Dobbs ruling after trying to keep things in perspective after the opinion was leaked in May , writing in part, “America until today, was the only Western country to have abortion as a constitutional right. No other country, not even Canada, not Germany, nor any of the other liberal countries. They did it by democratic rule.” No, abortion under Roe was a Court-created right that sufficiently interfered with democratic rule that it had to be overturned. This statement should also be remembered and referenced the next time a progressive pundit uses the “Everybody does it” argument that X U.S. policy or law is wrong because the U.S. has a different perspective than European “industrialized nations,” which, we are constantly told, know best. In fact, the U.S. still has a unique approach to abortion that no country in Europe has: the difficult ethics dilemma has no national resolution.

Sullivan also waxed on about how the Dobbs ruling came to pass only because of a series of random events. “If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, this wouldn’t have happened,” Sullivan wrote. “If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had resigned and retired when she should have, this probably wouldn’t have happened.” And if China hadn’t loosed a nasty virus on the world, he would still be President, and if Umpire Larry Barnett hadn’t botched a crucial call in Game #3 of the 1975 World Series, the Red Sox might have been World Champions 29 years before 2004. Every event, major and trivial, results from a confluence of unrelated and related factors. Resorting to “but if” narratives is useless. Sullivan is usually better than that.

2. Grandstanding, of course...Republican Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed a superfluous executive order aimed at protecting “reproductive health care services” in Massachusetts, even though the reversal of Roe had no effect on abortions in the Bay State at all.

Baker said that his new executive order will “further preserve” abortion rights in Massachusetts and protect “reproductive health care providers who serve out of state residents, adding,

“I am deeply disappointed in today’s decision by the Supreme Court which will have major consequences for women across the country who live in states with limited access to reproductive health care services. The Commonwealth has long been a leader in protecting a woman’s right to choose and access to reproductive health services, while other states have criminalized or otherwise restricted access … In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v Wade, it is especially important to ensure that Massachusetts providers can continue to provide reproductive health care services without concern that the laws of other states may be used to interfere with those services or sanction them for providing services that are lawful in the Commonwealth.”

Imagine what could be accomplished if the supporters of abortion had the integrity and respect for law and reality to state clearly the issues involved rather than to indulge in this kind of deliberately deceitful rhetoric. Can you think of any other group of human beings who are seriously affected by the decision Charlie? “Baby? What baby?” If you are such a supporter of abortion, why don’t you have the guts to say the word? “Reproductive health care”…”choice”…why won’t so many of abortion’s proud and indignant advocates admit what they are supporting?

That’s a rhetorical question. Otherwise, the Governor is just pandering to the mob.

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Sure, Jen.

Please take those meds.

Rubin was literally driven mad by Donald Trump’s election, and she wasn’t a particularly enlightening Washington Post pundit before that, when she posed as a conservative. Now the NeverTrump hysteria has clearly infected her logic, her perception, everything. However, Rubin’s  reactions to the Dobbs decision are right in line with those of the Left generally, which are characterized by insulting scaremongering, fury, emotional nonsense, legal fantasy, and an abandonment of all sense of proportion.

Again, GOOD. That’s who these people are, and we should all be grateful that the masks are off. There are many future citizens of this country who will owe their lives to their candor.

Back to Rubin: her disingenuous (or stunningly ignorant) conceit is that because the states now can regulate abortion, they now could choose to make abortion a capitol crime. They could also declare a state’s language to be Esperanto. When something isn’t going to happen it is unethical to claim it could happen, especially when it couldn’t. I am pretty certain that executing women who get abortions would be found to be a violation of the 8th Amendment, not to mention the fact that the public wouldn’t tolerate it.

Rubin’s Twitter feed is full of similarly ridiculous statements.

I’m going to do a full post on freakout highlights when I return from a meeting, but Rubin is special.

A threshold question before informed discussion can commence is “How did the final Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion change from the unethically leaked version everyone has been arguing about for many weeks?” A related question is whether the fact that the opinion was leaked, causing threats to the justices and harassment at their homes as well as a full-throated primal scream by abortion advocates, which encompasses most journalists and the entire Democratic Party, had any ameliorating effect on Justice Alito’s majority opinion.

The answer to that question is: “Nope! None whatsoever.” The uproar didn’t even dissuade Chief Justice Roberts from joining the majority, making Dobbs a 6-3 decision, though Roberts did write that he did not approve of over-ruling Roe.

As for the first, the answer is “Nothing substantive, just the additions one would expect in a final SCOTUS opinion.”

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