U.S. Society

“Good Luck In Hell”: Jury Abuse Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

12 angry men

 It’s not nice to be mean to juries.

More than that, it’s democracy self-abuse. Juries are the fractals of true democracy, played a crucial role in the intellectual germination of our founding documents  and are as important to the United States’ ideals and core beliefs as any institution.  Citizens contribute their time—okay, some need a little persuading—to take on the massive responsibility of life altering decisions, and despite their fallibility (and look at the rest of the government!) jurors deserve honor and respect.

For lawyers and judges to behave otherwise is not just foolish, it is prohibited by their respective professional ethics rules. Charles Guiteau, who shot President Garfield, was briefly a lawyer. He used to climb into the jury box to yell at jurors. That got him kicked out of the profession, so he moved on to shooting Presidents, which he was better at.

It’s even unethical to berate a former juror, as small firm New York attorney Frank Panetta of Massimo & Panetta  discovered when all of his ethics alarms malfunctioned simultaneously and he sent off the following masterpiece to Lauren Curry, the senior partner in another firm. Panetta is still steamed about a case he lost when a jury found against his client four years ago, and he blames Curry,  who served as his jury’s foreperson. He wrote in an Guiteau-like e-mail, and I swear, I’m not making this up: Continue reading →

The Unethical Cosby Victim: Jewel Allison

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

accuser

The thirty or so declared victims of sexual assault by Bill Cosby (sorry: when we get into double figures, “alleged” is misleading) have given various reasons for not reporting the crimes against them: fear of Cosby’s power, fear of retribution from the entertainment industry, fear of publicity, fear of not being believed, fear of humiliation. A recent addition to the list, however, has given an unequivocally unethical explanation for her 20 year silence in a Washington Post op-ed that has been called “courageous.” Jewell Allison’s confession is not courageous. It is disturbing and ominous. It shows what the trauma of the black experience in the United States has done to some African Americans, causing them to place group identification above reason, decency, good citizenship, compassion and common sense.

She writes:

“When I first heard Andrea Constand and Tamara Green publicly tell their stories about being drugged and assaulted by Cosby, I wasn’t relieved; I was terrified. I knew these women weren’t fabricating stories and conspiring to destroy America’s favorite dad, but I did not want to see yet another African American man vilified in the media. As I debated whether to come forward, I struggled with where my allegiances should lie – with the women who were sexually victimized or with black America, which had been systemically victimized.”

This makes no ethical sense or rational sense. Continue reading →

Transgender Ethics: Epic Trailblazer Malpractice In New Hampshire

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
Ex-N.H. state legislator, Stacy Laughton, a.k.a Barry Laughton.

Ex-N.H. state legislator Stacie Laughton, a.k.a  felon Barry Laughton.

Trailblazers have an ethical obligation when they presume to break a social or occupational barrier to a marginalized group’s participation and equal treatment. Simply put, their duty is to make the bias that has created the barrier and necessitated the “trail” look ignorant, cruel, foolish and unfair. A trailblazer does not have to be a shining star, though it helps, but must be capable of at least doing a solid, average, generally acceptable job., even in the grudging judgment of bigots.

This is because a trailblazer who does a poor job or displays character traits that are objectively inadequate for a role model, which a trailblazer inevitably becomes, risks adding to the barrier he or she just breached for those who follow behind them. The ethical requirement for trailblazers is the same as the traditional edict for doctors “First do no harm.” Being a trailblazer, however, is not easy, and since failure is catastrophic for the group a trailblazer represents, there is a duty not to attempt such a high-risk, high-profile cultural role unless the trailblazer is first, reasonably convinced that he or she the resources of talent, ability, fortitude, character and courage to succeed, and second, willing to accept and overcome the added stress of relentless attention and criticism.

There have been excellent trailblazers, cultural heroes all. Jackie Robinson, the first black Major League baseball player to break the color barrier is the template, but there are many other successes: Justice Thurgood Marshall, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic President of the U.S., Amelia Earhart, Diane Crump, the first female jockey, the late Ed Brooke, the first black U.S. Senator since reconstruction, and too many more to mention. There have also been some miserable failures. The worst trailblazer was probably Shannon Faulkner, who fought in the courts for two years to force The Citadel to accept female cadets, then, after she was victorious, showed up fat and unprepared, and washed out in just one week as millions of dubious vets said, “See? What did we tell you?” Then there was Carol Moseley Braun, the charismatic, promising African-American Democrat whon Illinois voters elected as the nation’s first black female Senator, only to turn out to be thoroughly corrupt.

More recently, we have seen other trailblazers fall short, like Michael Sam, the first openly gay player drafted by the NFL.  Is there a celebrity gay marriage that has not ended in a quick divorce? Most have been failures, reinforcing the belief that gays are promiscuous and unsuited for a real marriage. Most vividly of all in the realm of trailblazer malpractice, we are reminded of the disheartening and tragic examples of Barack Obama, and Eric Holder every day.

Still, in the annals of epic trailblazer fiascoes, it would be hard to top the story of Stacie Laughton, New Hampshire’s first openly transgender state legislator, who was elected in 2012 as one of three House members for Ward 4 in Nashua. Continue reading →

No Judgment At Planet Fitness

/ Jack Marshall / 316 Comments
They mean what they say!

They mean what they say!

In Midland, Michigan, a Planet Fitness gym revoked a woman’s membership because she complained that a man—actually a man who identifies as a woman— was in the woman’s locker room.

Company officials explained that she violated its “no judgment zone” policy. Planet Fitness  policy also states members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their self-reported gender identity.

Fine.

It’s their business, and they can make whatever silly and irresponsible rules they want. If they want to make members dress like chickens, wear noodles on their heads and speak only pig latin, that’s their choice. The establishments Planet Fitness wants to run, apparently, are ones where a woman can go into the ladies locker room and run into some hairy, naked guy with his dong hanging out, and she gets dinged because she objects, not knowing that he is really all girl at his creamy nougat center.

Okaaaaay…. Eventually Planet Fitness will have a membership that is all trans, all blind, or all pathologically politically correct, or perhaps have no establishments at all. When the company says “no judgment,” it really means it, because this shows a ludicrous lack of judgment. But ethical! The policies were all communicated to all members, so the woman violated the “don’t react negatively to the showboating trans individual in the ladies locker room who shows no respect or consideration for others who might not be quite ready for a full frontal” policy, and has no defense, except offensive normalcy.

Clearly “Men” and “Ladies” labels on locker rooms and bathrooms are no longer unambiguous or effective.

What do you think about “Penis” and “No Penis” signs? I think that solves the problem, especially in places where there’s no judgment.

 

Hillary’s Secret E-Mails: An Invaluable Ethics Litmus Test

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

finney_newday

All civic minded citizens should encourage as many individuals—public, private, elected, celebrities, media figures, reporters and pundits—to discuss the issues and significance of the Clinton e-mail scandal. It is a marvelous litmus test to unerringly reveal whether the individual understands basic ethical principles like integrity, honesty, responsibility and trust, as well as his or her reliance on intellectually and ethically bankrupt rationalizations like “Everybody does it,” “It’s not the worst thing,” “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and others, or, just as disturbing, whether the individual is willing to reject basic ethical principles in a misguided effort to defend a public figure unworthy of the sacrifice, like Hillary Clinton. Keep this public debate going. Before it has run its course, we may have outed thousands, hundreds of thousands, who we will know cannot themselves be trusted.

It takes all my will and civility reserves not to say that this is an IQ test as well. I keep reading comments on blogs and Facebook by people who really seem to be unable to fathom why it should matter when the individual who leads our official dealings with foreign governments mysteriously chooses to take dominion over all her official communications, allowing her to destroy them at will, when such conduct violates the policies and directives of the administration of which she is a member, her own department, and common sense, despite incurring security risks, despite questions over her foundation soliciting contributions from foreign governments while she was in a position to have such contributions warp national policy, when the individual involved, was well as her husband, has a history of skirting laws, obfuscation and mendacity. “This is just more manufactured Hillary-bashing!” Seriously? I know the Clintons pay people to say this, but really believing it requires total corruption or life-threatening brain lesions.

As an example of how this issue exposes a lack of honesty and integrity the way those blue light things show traces of blood on “CSI,” let’s examine the CNN transcript of yesterday’s segment on “New Day,” which featured a “point-counterpoint” style debate on the Clinton e-mails featuring former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and former Hillary press secretary (and current Media Matters partisan warrior) Karen Finney.

This pairing is manipulation by CNN, by the way. Nobody but hacks, liars and fools honestly defends Clinton’s conduct here, and many non-partisan commentators can articulate clearly exactly what’s wrong with it. Placing a presumed partisan like Fleischer opposite Finney cleverly and unethically suggests that this is one more political dust-up without substance, where there’s no real dispute, just a red/blue divide. That may be what CNN wishes were true, but this issue is not partisan, and shouldn’t be presented as such. The Washington Post, which has, like most of the print media, been pretty straight on this issue, played to the partisan spin by saying,

“Instead of a fresh chapter in which Clinton came into her own, her time as the country’s top diplomat now threatens to remind voters of what some people dislike about her — a tendency toward secrecy and defensiveness, along with the whiff of scandal that clouded the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.”

Wait, there are people who like secrecy and scandal? Are they called Democrats, perhaps? Clinton supporters? What an idiotic way to frame Hillary’s problem.

It’s not complicated: the issues involve trust and the character of a potential President.

Now here is the CNN transcript, with my comments in bold: Continue reading →

Why The Sweet Briar College Fight Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

sweet-briar-collegeEthics Alarms has been besieged by interest in the threatened Sweet Briar College closing, with the recent post on the topic already the third most viewed essay in the history of the blog. I was surprised; I shouldn’t have been. From an ethics and societal perspective, what the controversy stands for is as important as any covered here. It is also central to the nation itself.

When a business fails, the casualties include ambitions, opportunities, dreams, financial resources, community assets, and jobs. That is serious and tragic. Non profit organizations, however, exist to turn ideas into reality, to strengthen them, bolster them, and prove that they deserve to survive and flourish. The death of Sweet Briar will also mean the loss of ambitions, opportunities, dreams, financial resources, community assets, and jobs. Far more important, however, is that it will mean the death of an idea, or at very least the serious wounding of one.

This is why non profit boards should not be, as they so frequently are, merely comfortable curriculum vitae-stuffers  and networking forums for prominent dilettantes. Non profit boards are stewards of ideas, and they must also be willing and able to be warriors in defense of those ideas, if an idea is imperiled. It is not a job for the faint of heart, and the consequences of failure, or, as in the case of Sweet Briar, fearful and premature capitulation, are catastrophic, not just for the organization, institution and its constituents, but the entire U.S. culture.

Sweet Briar exists to nurture a particularly vital idea, the mission of training young women… Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Democratic Operative Paul Begala

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Voters do not give a shit. They do not even give a fart… Find me one persuadable voter who agrees with HRC on the issues but will vote against her because she has a non-archival-compliant email system and I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window and say it smells like roses.”

—Clinton enabler/mouthpiece/consultant Paul Begala, quoted in Politico’s essay by Gabriel Debendetti 

roses

Begala, just in case you’ve forgotten, was the most loathsome of Bill Clinton’s paid defenders—deceitful, smug, arrogant, Machiavellian. I’ll confess my bias: along with Karl Rove, David Axelrod, Dick Morris, James Carville and his wife, Mary Matalin, and others whose names I am mercifully unaware of so far, Begala and his species are the scourge of the political culture as well as democracy itself. Their stock in trade is misrepresentation, and their objective is to make Americans ignorant, uncritical, lazy, compliant, and gullible. The contempt they have for Americans is palpable, as in Begala’s quote. Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton and the E-mails: A Case Study In Ethics Corruption

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

corrupted

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of days now, but haven’t had the heart. Frankly, I am really sick of having to make the same point about the Clintons over and over again—they never learn, and will never change—knowing that so many people will just immediately turn off their brains and run for the rationalizations dispensary any time dishonesty, hypocrisy, deceit or misconduct by one of them is uncovered.

This happens, you see, because the Clinton are perhaps the most prominent among a particular harmful species of individual in our culture, the ethics corrupter. Ethics corrupters are popular, powerful, successful and famous people who, because they are popular, powerful, successful and famous, many citizens conclude that they must also be good and wise, and therefor trustworthy. Since they are (many believe) good and wise, what they choose to do must also be good, and when they are accused of doing wrong, even when the evidence is unavoidable that they have done wrong, there can be only two explanations to those vulnerable to correuption. The first is that the evidence, no matter how strong, cannot be believed, and those wielding it are in fact enemies of right, good, honesty and fairness. The second is that if these good and wise people did it, then what they did cannot be wrong, or can be justified, usually by “the ends justify the means.”

Thus by gaining the trust and admiration of good people, usually through clever use of dishonesty, deception and manipulation, ethics corrupters set their admirers and supporters up to have their own values weakened or destroyed. Richard Nixon caused honest people to defend the covering up of crimes. Charlie Rangel caused people with integrity to support accepting bribes. Bill Clinton made feminists excuse exactly the kind of sexual harassment they persuaded Clinton to sign a law prohibiting, and inspired lawyers to excuse perjury because “everybody lies about sex.” Lance Armstrong made parents who once taught their children not to cheat to defend cheating, because he had a foundation with a noble cause. Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly made TV viewers excuse lying by journalists.

Ethics corrupters make their supporters worse parents, friends, employees, employers and human beings; in turn, those corrupted supporters make society less ethical and more cynical as well. These are genuine cultural polluters; indeed, they are cultural pollution.

Hillary Clinton is an ethics corrupter, and the response to the revelations of her use of exclusively personal e-mails proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There is no benign interpretation of her conduct regarding her State Department e-mails. It was not a mistake; one cannot claim that it was accidental. Since it was intentional, there must have been a purpose, and the only conceivable purposes are unethical ones. According to the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration regulations in effect when Clinton took office, “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”  With a private e-mail account and only using that for official correspondence, Clinton did not have a system that ensured such preservation. She, not the system, determined what would be preserved. Anything not preserved or left on her private account would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Is there any explanation for having a private account only, an justification that is simultaneously responsible, plausible and does not suggest that Clinton wanted to control which of her communications could come before the public and the press?

No.
Continue reading →

The Tangled Ethics of the Down Syndrome Cheerleader

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

There’s a lot going on here, and I may lack the ethics dexterity, or perhaps the courage, to figure it out.

I learned about the story on CNN this morning, as the newscasters were getting misty-eyed and “Awwing” all over the place. With a lot of fairly disturbing ethics issues rotting on my plate, I was looking for something uplifting to write about. I’m not sure whether this is it or not.

Here is the most recent on-line story about Kory Mitchell, a sophomore on the varsity cheerleading squad for Manitou Springs (Colorado) High School, who was born with Down Syndrome:

DENVER, Colo. – A Colorado teen with Down syndrome has made her dream of competing in a cheerleading competition come true.

Colorado’s 3-A cheerleading champions hail from Manitou Springs. At the top of their pyramid is a teenager who has overcome serious challenges in her life. The countdown is on as thirteen girls get one last practice in at the Colorado School of Mines. In minutes, the Manitou Springs Mustangs huddle will compete against other top teams.

Cheerleaders take center stage showcasing their spirit and synchronicity. The Manitou Springs Mustangs huddle one last time. And for the first time, joining them in competition is 16-year-old Kory Mitchell.

“She is full of life and full of energy and always wants to be a part of everything,” says her mom, Bonnie King, as she watches with pride.

Her daughter has dreamt about being a cheerleader since elementary school. Her mom is emotional.

But learning these already complicated routines is harder for Kory. “It`s just a tough road when you have a differently-abled child. And to see them have a sense of belonging and acceptance is what she wants, of course, is just so beautiful to see it,” mom says.

Kory’s teammates see what’s under the surface. Things like courage, patience and unconditional acceptance.

“She`s pretty spunky. And she`s got some sass. She loves being out there. It`s nice to see her smile and part of the team,” says one of her teammates. Sometimes competitions aren’t about who wins, but a little hardware doesn’t hurt.

Kory accepted the trophy and a hand from her teammates.

“It`s my dream come true. I love my girls a lot. I`m a big fan of cheerleaders,” Kory said.And Kory’s teammates are big fans of her. This was Kory`s first competition, but she has cheered with the team since last year at football and basketball games.

Observations (some of them reluctant): Continue reading →

Unspoken Ethical Quote Of The Month: Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Attn. General Holder Testifies At Senate Judiciary Hearing On Justice Dept Oversight

“No, I respect the motives and intentions of my critics. Those who have opposed me genuinely disagree with my philosophy and approach to the job, and I would never denigrate them by attributing their opposition to race, bias, or anything but the same passion and belief in their goals for the nation that I have in mine.”

—What Attorney General Eric Holder could have and should have answered in his “exit interview” with Politico’s Mike Allen, in answer to the question, “Now, there clearly have been times …when you have felt disrespected on Capitol Hill. How much of that do you think relates to race?”

Holder didn’t answer this way, however.

Holder is black, and consistent with the message that has been trumpeted from the White House, Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Presidential advisor and Holder consort Al Sharpton for more than six years, any and all problems, criticism, misfortune or failure affecting African Americans can plausibly, reasonably, credibly, and advantageously be attributed to racial bias or outright racism.

Thus Holder’s actual answer to Allen was…

“Yeah, there have been times when I thought that’s at least a piece of it.”

Continue reading →