abortion

The Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minn: Wrong On Belief, Right On Integrity

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

“Oh, what the hell. Sign him up.”

In Barnesville, Minnesota, the Catholic Church has denied the religious sacrament of confirmation to two students who posted their support for gay marriage on Facebook.

Good.

The Catholic Church has been barely holding on to a dwindling membership by adopting the strategy of becoming an organized religion for hypocrites. Being a member of any church should mean the full acceptance of its core teachings. The students involved publicly expressed their disagreement with the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage, and the Church was right to deny them confirmation.

Is the Catholic Church dead wrong to oppose same sex marriage as a sin? Of course. The way to make the Church enter the 21st Century is for double-talkers like John Kerry, Joe Biden and Mario Cuomo to show some backbone and integrity, and reject the Church or their upbringing because it doesn’t accept same sex marriage and abortion, while they obviously do. Instead, these and other faux-Catholics absurdly claim in public that they support diametrically opposed positions simultaneously. All three have piously stated that as Catholics they believe that life begins at conception (ergo, abortion is the sinful taking of innocent human life), but that as elected officials they feel it is inappropriate to “impose their beliefs” on the public. Of course, what elected leaders do is to impose their beliefs on the public, wherever those beliefs come from. What Cuomo, Biden and Kerry, as well as many others, have done, is to aggressively and pro-actively support policies, like abortion-on-demand, that they and their Church say they believe are wrong. Liars or hypocrites, take your pick. Continue reading →

Ten More Hollywood Ethics Cures For A Post-Election Hangover (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Here are the final five ethics movies, making 25 on the Ethics Alarms list so far. Except for the last, they are a sober batch. I think I now understand why they are at the back end of my list of 25; this group is darker than the first 15 and more tinged with defeat than hope. Their ethics lessons, however, remain inspiring, or if not quite that, thought-provoking:

6. The Insider (1999)

Another true story, one that explores the murky area of whistleblowing and whistleblowers as well as the conflict between the business of journalism and the profession of journalism.

Ethical issues highlighted: confidentiality, whistleblowing, law vs. ethics, sacrifice, courage, media ethics, integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, betrayal

Favorite quote: “You’re in a state of conflict. Here’s how it lays out. If you have vital insider stuff that the American people for their welfare need to know and you feel compelled to disclose it and this violates the agreement – that’s one thing. On the other hand, if you want to honor the agreement, it’s simple. Say nothing. Do nothing. The only guy who can figure this out is you, and that’s you all by yourself.” Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) Continue reading →

Virginia Campaign Lies: the Unethical Use of the Dishonest “Would”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The next U.S. Senator from Virginia? You could do worse! In fact, Virginia might.

I’m going to vote for Tim Kaine, the ex-Democratic Governor of Virginia running against George Allen, the Republican trying to regain the seat he lost in 2006 to James Webb. After the slimy, dishonest campaign Allen ran against Webb ( full disclosure: I went to law school with the Senator, and know him personally. A more honorable, courageous, principled man doesn’t walk the earth), Allen lost any chance of a vote from me forever, and it wouldn’t matter if his opponent was a toilet brush.

Nonetheless, Kaine’s ads are making me think he’s only a step or two above toilet brush level. Especially outrageous is this line, from a “war on women” ad “approved” by Tim Kaine, intoned by an announcer as the camera shows a woman:

                   “Allen would take away her Constitutional rights by reversing Roe v. Wade.”

Even counting “v.” as a word, this inexcusable statement includes four misrepresentations in just twelve words, an impressive total, though I’m sure Bill Clinton has topped it at one point of another. Let’s see: Continue reading →

Unethical Mindsets: “You Can’t Be A Feminist If You’re Anti-Abortion”

/ Jack Marshall / 78 Comments

Oxymoron?

I don’t know how I ended up on the Bea Magazine site, but I did, and I made the mistake of reading an article and a comment thread on the topic of whether feminists can be “pro-life,” or anti-abortion, if you aren’t a fan of euphemisms. As I expected, but not as I hoped, the consensus was that indeed, opposing abortion requires one’s ejection from the feminist tent, at least in the view of this particular cadre of feminists.

“Brillliant Nora Ephron,” the post by Diane notes, wrote that “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.”  Well, Nora wasn’t so brilliant that day, because this is classic backward reasoning. It is framing reality by using ideology, the crystallization of confirmation bias into its most dangerous, poisonous and historically destructive form. It embraces the statement, “my mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” Indeed, it requires that facts be seen, filtered and interpreted through a pre-existing template that requires and then dictates a given result. Continue reading →

The Akin Affair: A Brief Note on Being Fair To Idiots

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

A Baby Fairy (from the Todd Akin collection)

Todd Akin, as I discussed in the recent post, is too dumb to serve in high elected office, and his refusal (at least so far) to give up his nomination for the U.S. Senate after proving it marks him as unethical as well.

Nonetheless, an astounding number of pundits, Democrats and social media users are making fools of themselves and missing the fish in the barrel by concentrating their fire on Akin’s use of the phrase “legitimate rape.” Many of them apparently never read his quote, and really think the poor, silly man said that rape could be “legitimate”, as in “legal, just, valid or proper,” which is what the word really means. He didn’t say that, and he didn’t mean that. He obviously didn’t mean that, and it is unfair and misleading to condemn him on the basis of what he didn’t say.

Here is his quote again, speaking of women getting pregnant after being raped: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)…Plus Some Clarifications

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Apparently Prissy told Todd Akin’s family all about the Baby Faries…

To clarify, Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in opposition to Sen. Claire McCaskill, is not an Ethics Dunce because he said, in a recent TV interview, this, in response to whether it should be illegal for a woman impregnated by a rapist to get an abortion:

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

No, that statement just proves that he’s an idiot. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The ACLU

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

I suppose they just can’t help themselves, sometimes.

So handsome…and so foolish to mess up with partisan politics.

I support the American Civil Liberties Union because of its mission, and because it is on the correct side of issues more often than not. Still, it is stocked with left-wing ideologues, and too often is blatantly political, which damages its reputation, perceived integrity and effectiveness. Every American should be a supporter of a non-profit organization that stands for individual rights and freedoms as defined by the Constitution. Once such a group aligns itself clearly with one side of the political spectrum, however, this is impossible. At very least, the organization should refrain from partisan political attacks, which raises questions of conflict of interest, fairness, and independent judgment. The ACLU is too important to sully with political bias, but since it is run by people full of it, such taint is inevitable.*

Thus we have the embarrassing “report” by ACLU Liberty Watch. I can’t tell what the affiliation with the ACLU is; I assume that the ACLU approves and oversees an entity that leads with its name. This report attacks Mitt Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, as being “anti-civil liberties,” using the most dubious and extreme rationales to do so. My instant reaction: How can I trust an organization that proudly publishes such slanted trash with such obvious partisan intent to be a dispassionate watchdog on my civil liberties?

The answer: I can’t. Neither can you. Continue reading →

Liars For President

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a liar as President. I’m not talking about the kind of lies that are periodically unavoidable in leadership and governance, as much as we would like to pretend they are not. I’m talking about “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” type of lies, intentional falsehoods designed to deceive the public for  political advantage with no benefit to the nation or its occupants whatsoever. Unfortunately, we are about to elect a liar as President, because lying in political campaign ads, and particularly negative ads, is sunk deep into the system like an inoperable brain tumor. It is fair to say that every President since George Washington has done it, and thus the public accepts it, and the news media shrugs it off. Continue reading →

Legal/Ethical Train Wreck in Indiana: The Case of the Poisoned Fetus

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Mother, failed suicide, accused murderer, and ethics train wreck engineer.

If there are logical and ethical holes in a law, you can count on a case eventually coming along that will make them obvious and painful. Thus it is that the the case of Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese immigrant living in Indiana, was concocted by the vengeful Gods of Inconsistency to highlight some of the legal problems in two notorious ethical gray areas, abortion and suicide. I’m not going to even try to solve the mess. It’s hard enough to describe it.

Suicide is illegal in Indiana, but attempted suicide is not. In Indiana, as in most jurisdictions, however, if one’s unsuccessful  suicide kills another by accident, that could be prosecuted as manslaughter, through the doctrine of transferred intent. In the case of Shuai, she drank poison, ostensibly to kill herself. But she also wrote a note saying that she was “taking the baby.” Of course, when a pregnant woman kills herself, that usually suggests that she understands that her act will kill her unborn child as well.  Perhaps she was trying to kill herself and wasn’t considering the baby. Perhaps she was trying to kill the baby, and not herself. Perhaps she was trying to kill both herself and her child.

What happened, however, is that she lived. The baby was born, but died shortly thereafter as a consequence, prosecutors say, of the poison Shuai swallowed. Continue reading →

Ethics Article of the Week: George Will On His Son’s Birthday

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Happy birthday, Jon.

Conservative columnist George Will has only occasionally mentioned his Down Syndrome-inflicted son Jon in his columns, but when he has, it has provided an extra dimension to Jon’s father, who usually comes across in print and on TV as cynical, dour, and archly intellectual. Today is Jon’s birthday, so Will devotes the full column to him, his challenges, and, when all is said and done, ethics.

It’s a beautifully written piece, as Will’s columns often are, and a tender one. More importantly, however, it is an essay that should provoke thought, beginning with the fact that the only reason Will wrote this column is that he and his wife chose, 40 years ago, to do what 90% of all parents informed that their gestating child has Down Syndrome refuse to do: allow the child to be born.

The column is here

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Graphics: Richmond Times-Dispatch