Mark Tapscott is a veteran Washington, D.C. political pro and investigative journalist (who has weighed in at Ethics Alarms a time or two). Late yesterday he focused on clarifying the troubling Rolling Stone story I wrote about here.
That Rolling Stone piece was headlined, “SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe,” an allegation that fed directly into the pro-abortion trope that the Dobbs decision was substantially motivated by theological fervor rather than legal analysis. In the Ethics Alarms post, I expressed skepticism that the story could be accurate because no mainstream media source had picked it up, and also because any Justices praying with a representative of a religious organization before ruling on a case in which that organization had submitted a brief would create a neon-bright appearance of impropriety. On the other hand, I found it unlikely that the publication would drop such a “bombshell” without strong evidence, since its news reporting credibility was on lengthy probation after its phantom UVA “gang rape” story fiasco in 2015.
Now the verdict’s in, thanks to Tapscott: Rolling Stone apparently hasn’t learned anything about journalism ethics the last seven years. In a “Culture” column for PJ Media, Tapscott explains:Continue reading →
The Liberty Bell rang out on this date in 1776 to announce the Declaration of Independence to Philadelphia (not on the Fourth, like in “1776,” but it was a nice way to end the musical dramatically).
Surely Ethics Alarms readers can find ethics developments of equal import to proclaim today. Well, close, anyway….
Gallup has released its annual poll of Americans asking about their trust in 16 major U.S. institutions. You can see the horrible results above. Ethics Alarms has covered this poll for many years, because trust is both a prime ethics value and also the most important one for a democracy. I wrote years ago on the old Ethics Scoreboard about how Democrats were playing with fire by seeding distrust in our elections and the Supreme Court by hammering on the too-close 2000 Presidential election as a “stolen” while claiming the Gore “won.” I called the strategy “pulling at the fabric of democracy,” if I recall, noting that our system uniquely requires public trust in our processes, institutions, leaders and fellow members of the public. Since then, the level of distrust has both fallen and widened.
Even applying the obligatory distrust of polls themselves, Gallup’s conclusions are frightening, in part because they feel accurate. Not only is the public less confident in major U.S. institutions than it was a year ago, it is the worst it has been across the board since Gallup started checking. There were significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The Supreme Court fell lower than it ever has been, not surprising since two of the institutions regarded correctly as less trustworthy have been cynically and irresponsibly deriding it for purely ideological motives. The Presidency has dropped in trust even more than SCOTUS, which shows that the public is paying attention. Congress hasn’t fallen as far in percentage points, but only because it had fallen so far already. The five points it lost in trust almost cuts its previous low in half.
Thus it is not, perhaps, coincidental that less than two weeks ago,the Presidency and the news media were further exposed by the discovery of a 2018 voicemail from President Biden that proved his repeated denials about speaking with crooked Number Two Son Hunter Biden about his foreign business dealings were outright lies.
Rolling Stone has reported that during an evangelical victory celebration in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the Dobbs decision, Capitol Hill religious leader Peggy Nienaber got herself recorded saying that she has prayed with sitting justices inside the SCOTUS building. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber boasted. Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. Liberty Counsel frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court, and filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.”He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.” But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched theministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
The couple above and their sign outside the Supreme Court building triggered a series of telling attacks on the option of abortion after a photo of them was tweeted and went “viral.” Mark Hamill, the “Star Wars” star who has supported himself of late by being the voice of “The Joker” in animated “Batman” features, led the way with this incoherent but snarky tweet:
Attacks on adoption and those advocating it as a non-homicidal alternative to abortion are one more manifestation of how the Dobbs decision has unmasked so many of the pro-abortion progressives who had been hiding behind the deceitful “choice” trope. Now we are hearing advocacy for up-to-the-moment-of-birth abortions, and rationalizations for the procedure ranging from economic benefits to the economy and avoidance of disruptions to women’s ambitions, to arguments that children in poverty, with health problems or in unstable families are better off if they never draw a breath. This long-delayed candor will be, in the long run, a beneficial development. Finally abortion ethics can be debated acknowledging the unethical priorities and values that have been used to sanctify it for so long.
I have a post coming up related to the long-time discrimination against women in the U.S., which I, growing up in the Marshall household, was completely unaware of into the first part of my adult life. July 6th is one of many significant dates in the long struggle of women to gain equal rights and equal treatment with men, as well as proper respect in the culture. On this date in 1957, it was a woman, Althea Gibson, who became the first African-American to win a championship at Wimbledon, when she won the women’s singles tennis title, and in 1976, women were admitted into U.S. Naval Academy for the first time.
Discriminating against women just never occurred to me. I had a younger sister who could do anything I could, but often better. My mother was talented, funny, and self-evidently an equal foil for my lawyer father, who always treated her as an equal in every way. He had been raised during the Depression by a fiercely independent single mother, and while I never knew Lullabelle (what a great name!), my amazing maternal grandmother, Sophia, whom I knew very well, was a family legend, coming to America from Sparta at 15, working to bring the rest of her family over to the States as well, raising eight children, and never, ever taking any crap from anyone.
Early on I read the correspondence between John Adams and his brilliant wife and partner in all things Abigail; the whole concept of regarding women as less capable or deserving of opportunities to do and be whatever they chose never dawned on me for a ridiculously long time, and the extent of American discrimination against half the population is still surprising me even now.
As is often the case, the vehicle of my current enlightenment is baseball. A fellow fan and friend gifted me with a membership in SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. The Spring issue of its journal is substantially focused on the travails of women who played baseball or wanted to, and the stories are horrifying, all the way into the 1970s.
I’ll have more on this topic coming up.
1. Okay, the commentariate has insisted that Kamala Harris does not deserve Julie Principle treatment on Ethics Alarms, so I feel obligated to report that while speaking about the recent mass shooting in Illinois, the Vice-President—the first woman Vice-President!—said this:
“We have to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to take this seriously.”
[Notice of Correction:Another, exaggerated version of this quote has been circulating, and I originally fell for it. Thanks to Neil Dorr for spotting the mistake]
I think this is serious: there is something the matter with her. She does this kind of stuck-needle thing frequently; I don’t understand it. She can’t possibly be as dim as these episodes suggest. She did get through law school, after all. It is demeaning to women that the mainstream media lets this stuff pass, when Dan Quayle was regularly skewered for garbling his words in public statements. The low standards most of the media holds the Veep to is a form of condescension, and the benign neglect probably keeps her from addressing the problem, whatever it is. Continue reading →
I’m late to the party on this one, but it deserves a special post.
That’s Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack’s Fourth of July video, showing her (as you can see) twerking upside-down in a bikini. Mack says to the camera, “Vote Senator Mack.” Classy!
The mind boggles. Elected officials are obligated to represent high standards of decorum and respect for their office. Does it really have to be explained why this conduct is irresponsible and disrespectful, as well as civically incompetent? If twerking half-naked on one’s head is acceptable public behavior by a legislator, what isn’t? This is, in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Continue reading →
I don’t trust polls, and I really don’t trust Harvard. However, the new poll by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll gives me hope, and, I confess, I especially appreciate it because it reflects what I thought was the case anyway. The abortion-related polling is at the end of the poll report, but I don’t think that’s why the mainstream media has concentrated on the topics represented earlier. You will see why.
The poll is here. Predictably, it indicates that the American public doesn’t understand the law or the function of the Supreme Court as well as an educated and civically responsible populace in a democracy should, but then they have been manipulated, deceived and under-educated on these matters. It also indicates, contrary to the claims of the pro-abortion forces, that the public isn’t fooled: it knows that there is more to an abortion than a woman’s “choice.”
It’s embarrassing, but amazingly few of those responsible seem to be embarrassed.
Robert E. Crimo III, 21, the “alleged” shooter in the homicidal attack in Highland Park, was as unstable as its possible to be without being locked up. But that’s the problem: he was never arrested, despite officers seizing 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from his home in 2019. Crimo also posted music videos online that seemed to refer to mass shootings, some including cartoon images of victims spurting blood. In one video, a gunman lies in a pool of blood near police cars. But are the gun-phobics going to assert that social media posts, songs and videos are sufficient to justify psychiatric observation and the elimination of Constitutional rights? Hip-hop artists who rap about rape and cop-killing will be easy targets for that movement.
Many years ago, I was charged with running a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study on rising Hispanic business in the U.S. I worked with many Hispanic scholars and organizations, including the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. One of the recommendations in the draft report, written by a Cuban-American diplomat and scholar, was that Hispanic-Americans needed to purge their culture of toxic habits and traditions that undermined business success, and the primary example was tardiness and a lack of concern with meeting deadlines and appointment times.
The point was especially vibrant because the meetings of the group were almost always delayed while we waited for several key members who wandered in anywhere from 30 minutes to more than an hour after the designated time.
There was some animated debate over this, because some members—not just the habitually tardy ones—tried to argue that impugning the “manyana” attitude tradition would be an insult, allowing “white” values to erase “brown” ones, and declaring non-Hispanic culture “superior.” Continue reading →
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