The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

HR 734, introduced in February, is a fine example of the Ethics Alarms motto, “When ethics fails, the law takes over, and usually makes a mess of it.” The objective—I hope— of the proposed law is to eliminate cynical cheating in collegiate and high school sports by male athletes have “transitioned” after going through male puberty. (Lia Thomas—above–guess which one is Lia!— comes to mind.) I say “I hope” because one could read the bill to be expressing targeted animus against transgendered individuals, many/most/some of whom—who knows, really?—are trying to cope with a genuine and life defining problem. However, the bill as written is both too narrow and too broad at the same time, while skirting the major question at issue by pretending it is settled. This is a bad bill, and would be a bad law, perhaps even an unconstitutional law.

I might even conclude that it was composed only to grandstand on the issue for political gain rather than as a good faith effort to address a problem. The Bill states,

“(d) (1) It shall be a violation of subsection (a) for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.

(2) For the purposes of this subsection, sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.

(3) Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to prohibit a recipient from permitting males to train or practice with an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls so long as no female is deprived of a roster spot on a team or sport, opportunity to participate in a practice or competition, scholarship, admission to an educational institution, or any other benefit that accompanies participating in the athletic program or activity.”.

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Ethics Dunce, Rabbi and “Rolling Stone” Columnist Jay Michaelson Provides A Depressing Lesson In How “Bias Makes You Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Was this really so hard an episode to respond to competently?

As discussed in this post, the Dalai Lama got himself videoed while pressuring a young boy to kiss him (on the lips) and asking the boy to <cough> suck the holy man’s tongue. Too bad Peter Graves is dead: he could play the Dalai Lama in a movie…

“Joey…would you like to suck my tongue?” was apparently cut. But I digress.

On “CNN Tonight” panel this week, and host Alisyn Camerota asked Michaelson to comment on the disturbing video. Ethics Aalrms frozen solid, the rabbi answered,

“The Dalai Lama is a very playful human being. And we may see this in a weird, kind of gross, sexualized way, but this is about as sexual as a bowl of plain rice. There is nothing sexual … or erotic happening in this encounter. Tibetan culture just has different boundaries…[the tongue] is what we kiss with, it’s sexualized … it’s not seen that way in Tibetan culture. This is a part of the body. It’s something playful….The apology was in order. This was clearly something that was at best, you know, insensitive to how this would be seen by a large swath of the world population. [But]“the Dalai Lama is one of my spiritual heroes. I have met him. Being in his presence is really one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life. And the aura of loving kindness that he has is evident, even here where he’s being playful in a way that in Western culture would certainly be inappropriate.”

Since the rabbi wasn’t defending Joe Biden, Camerota felt free to actually practice journalism and challenge this spin, saying, “the boy doesn’t want to” kiss the Dalai Lama or suck his tongue,” and adding that the Dalai Lama is “taking the boy’s head … just sort of reading the body language here. I’ll take your word for it that it seemed differently there culturally, but the boy doesn’t seem to be wanting to participate in this.”

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Ethics Implications Of The Bar Exam First-Time Test-Taker Demographic Pass Rates

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar released the 2022 ABA data on bar exam pass rates by race, ethnicity and gender. The DEI folks will NOT be happy.

There were 33,721 first-time bar exam hopefuls in 2022. 2,510 candidates were, and presumably still are, black. Their pass rate was 57% in 2022, down from 61% in 2021. Of all of the demographic groups, this was the worst rate. The rest:

  • Native Americans:  60% out of 183 candidates.
  • Hawaiians: 69% out of 45 candidates.
  • Mixed race:  74% out of 1,186 candidates.
  • Asians: 75% out of 2,199 candidates
  • Whites: 83% out of 21,553 candidates.

In the ever amusing gender categories, the breakdown was:

  • 80% for men
  • 79% for the, uh, creative gender identities
  • 77% for women 
  • 63% for those who did not disclose their gender.

The ABA standard for the minimum adequate law school pass rate for first time bar exam-takers is an average of 75% over two years.

Ethical implications:

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The Trouble With “Do Something!” Part I: Presenting The Ethics Alarms “Do Something” Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Later today (I hope), I will post am analysis of the “Do Something!” phenomenon, its roots, political history, and ethical failings. As a precedent, however, I am introducing this new tool that I will rely on in my analysis today and going forward: The Ethics Alarms “Do Something!” Scale. It has ten levels that describe proposed policy solutions to perceived societal threats, crises and problems. #1 is the most responsible and thus the best, and #10 is the most emotion-based and irrational, and therefore the “bottom of the barrel.”

As always, I welcome suggestions and refinements. The scale will be used to measure the status of current and future “Do something!” demands. This week, we are mostly hearing them in the context of the shootings in Nashville and Louisville. Here is the new scale, as currently constituted:

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“What About Womanface?”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In August, lecturer Cathy Boardman of the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in Manchester raised the provocative question of whether. if a white person wearing black make-up is racist, a drag performer or a “transitioning” male posing as a female should be regarded as similarly demeaning. “What about womanface?” she asked.

She was promptly fired, because she had, her employers said, upset transgender students. Boardman is unrepentant and is appealing the decision, but her question has taken on new relevance in the wake of the Bud Light decision to use a satiric trans “influencer” in its latest marketing campaign.

How did I miss the expression “womanface” for so long? It’s in the Urban Dictionary. The first high profile mention of the analogy with blackface came from pre-House, pre-Trump Derangement Mary Cheney, who is a lesbian, on her private Facebook page. After seeing a TV commercial for “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” she wrote,

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The Bud Light Trans-Pandering Fiasco Sucks Ann Althouse Into Her Most Clueless Post Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

I am, as regular readers here know, generally an admirer of Ann Althouse, the retired Madison Wis. law professor who has operated a long-time blog with a wide following I can only envy. But when Ann jumps the rails, she doesn’t fool around, and her post today commenting on the Bud Light-Dylan Mulroney ethics train wreck makes me marvel, not for the first time, at some of her blind spots.

As usual, someone else’s article triggered her analysis; in this case, it was “Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt against transgender campaign/’In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else,’ says a St. Louis bar owner” at the Fox Business website. The passage that triggered Ann was this:

“Bud Light vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid said she was inspired to update the ‘fratty’ and ‘out-of-touch’ humor of the beer company with ‘inclusivity’ in a March 30 interview with the podcast ‘Make Yourself At Home.’But her effort to be inclusive excluded the people who matter most — Bud Light drinkers, according to St. Louis-area operator John Rieker. ‘It’s kind of mind-boggling they stepped into this realm,’ Rieker, who owns Harpo’s Bar and Grill in Chesterfield, Missouri, told FOX Business. ‘You’re marketing to an audience that represents a fraction of 1% of consumers while alienating the much larger base of your consumers.'”

Here are Althouse’s reactions, with my reactions to her, because this cannot be left unrebutted: Continue reading →

Now THAT Was An Unethical “Career Day” Presentation!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yikes. Talk about ethics alarms failing!

In Lake Oswego, Oregon, Ellen Sawo was giving a “Career Day” presentation at Lakeridge Middle School. Apparently she was not getting the response from students that she felt was appropriate, because she snapped, started swearing at them and finally slapped one student in the face.

Gee, even Judge Duncan didn’t do that, and the Stanford Law students wouldn’t let him speak at all!

Perhaps Career Day speakers need to be more carefully vetted in the future. Anyway, Sawo was escorted from the school and was later arrested by police.

I wonder what career she was promoting. I sure hope it wasn’t “professional ethicist.”

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/11/23: Bits And Pieces

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

It’s a bit early in the day for the Dave Clark Five, but they do bring back memories…It’s amazing to think back on, but when they first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the group was widely regarded as indistinguishable from The Beatles, just another British Invasion group that teenage girls were screaming about. This song even knocked “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” off of the #1 spot on the UK Singles Chart.

A weird housekeeping note: a recent entry into the comment wars who ripped off over a hundred comments in just a handful of days has gotten himself/herself/themselves (in case it’s conjoined twins) suspended indefinitely for refusing to send me a real email address and a full name as the Comment Policies clearly require. I don’t understand this at all. It’s not an unreasonable request. I am also fascinated that the participants from just one side of the ideological spectrum behave this way, showing deliberate contempt and disrespect for a forum in which they are guests and beneficiaries. This isn’t the first time.

It’s really frustrating to attempt Diversity and Inclusion of viewpoints here when so many progressives enter determined to act like jerks.

1. Clearly, I spoke too soon about rejoining Twitter. Becoming active on Twitter will require a huge time commitment, and having re-joined to support Elon Musk’s mission to restore the platform to a forum not being manipulated to advance a particular party’s agendas and narratives, I am rapidly feeling misled and betrayed. I’ve got an account again , but the chaos under Musk continues. This mess, part of the craziness described in “After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files” strongly suggests that he is too mercurial and unstable to deliver on his promises, or that it may have always been impossible to do so.

2. The latest “book banning” controversy: I don’t know what to make of stories like this one, and there are a lot of them. “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” was removed from a library at Vero Beach High School after Moms for Liberty in Indian River County claimed that the book was inappropriate. The school’s principal either agreed with the objection or didn’t have the guts to oppose it (most principals are weenies and will always choose the path of least resistance) and the book was removed. The book at one point shows Anne walking in a park, admiring female nude statues, and describes her proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts. It also has relatively little context regarding the Holocaust.

To the Left, this is just another example of Cro-Magnon conservatives “banning” books that are insufficiently de-sexualized. To the Right, the book is needlessly edgy and not the kind of thing that belongs in school libraries. A favorable review of the book by the Times of Israel is here.

What lines in school library collection decisions should be drawn? Is it really necessary to include a graphic novelization of Anne Frank’s story that has Peter whispering “Penis!” to Anne during dinner and imagines her commenting about another girl, “Did you see that pair of melons she’s sprouted?” Yet even if the good taste of those choices is debatable, does that justify removing the book?

Incidentally, removing a book from a school library is hardly “banning” it.

3. Today’s gun control “Do something!” virtue signaler: Criminal defense attorney and Fox News contributor Ted Williams (not the headless frozen baseball great). In response to yesterday’s mass shooting in Louisville, Williams told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Saying he was “sick and tired” of the shootings, Williams said,

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Well, There’s Some Good News: The NYT’s Marxist Tendencies Are Showing But Its Readers Are Unsympathetic

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Times went all out with a feature about how food delivery drivers were being exploited and under-rewarded. The headline: “$388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of Uber Eats and DoorDash.”

The assumption of reporter Mark Abramson is that the more the food costs, the more the tip should be, presumably because anyone who can afford $388 for sushi should share the wealth. But a delivery driver does exactly the same amount of work for the sushi order as a he would for 20 bucks worth of egg rolls. Why is he entitled to the same level of tip as a waiter or waitress who ideally contributes to a pleasurable dining experience?

Well, he isn’t. And though the Times readers are as woke as they come, this bit of working class hero victimization propaganda was too tough to swallow. Some examples…

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How DEI And Globalism Pollutes American Culture: The Bud Light Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Even though Budweiser choosing a silly, female- (and male) mocking trans “influencer” to promote a product with a market base guaranteed to find the campaign offensive, it made sense to do it anyway. How? Why? The answer shows just how difficult it will be, and already is, for the United States to maintain its unique values, ethical, political and otherwise, in a global culture determined to force our outlying experiment in individual liberty into conformity.

That video above is from Refinitiv, a hugely influential international company I never had heard of before last week. It is an American-British global provider of financial market data and infrastructure, founded in 2018 as a subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group. The company has an annual turnover of $6 billion with more than 40,000 client companies in 190 countries. Though it presumes to rank companies according to their “ethics,” it is a soul-less, ethics-free company itself. For example, Refinitiv bowed to pressure from China during 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, censoring over 200 stories by Reuters by removing them from its Eikon platform for consumers in Mainland China. The company then developed a “Strategic China filter” to block politically-sensitive stories from readers in Mainland China.

This is the company that Budweiser was submitting to by turning Bud Lite into a DEI pandering product. Refinitiv wields a powerful Diversity and Inclusion Index “designed to measure the relative performance of companies against factors that define diverse and inclusive workplaces.” Woke and “socially conscious investors, including institutional investors, rely on the index to make investment decisions. A declining or inadequate index can mean billions in lost investments.

Budweiser’s seemingly incomprehensible decision to do a complete 180 degree reversal in its public image was driven by slavish fealty to this made-up index, which has power because people and organization have chosen to give it power. In this it resembles the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing advocacy group that can brand an organization as “racist” or as a “hate group” just by saying so. To Refinitiv’s world view, making a trans celebrity a spokesperson justifies gold stars and bonus points.

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