Sympathy and empathy are wonderful and admirable qualities, but they can mess up ethics alarms but good, causing them to ring out with gusto when perhaps they shouldn’t be set off at all.

This, I’m sorry to say, is what seems to be going on with the public and the media in the wake of a North Carolina judge denying Alaina Giordano primary custody of her two children,  in part because Giordano has Stage IV breast cancer, and in part because she is unemployed. Giordano is upset and nobody can blame her for that. She has also started a website exhorting readers to “Say NO! to CANCER discrimination!” There is a Facebook page (of course) rallying support for her, and it already has over 14,000 fans. An online petition to the governor called “Do Not Allow NC Judge To Take Alaina Giordano’s Children Just Because She Has Cancer ” has more than 75,000 signers.

Yet there is nothing inherently unethical, illogical or unfair about family law Judge Nancy E. Gordon awarding custody of 11-year-old Sofia and 5-year-old Bud to their father, who lives and works in Chicago, rather than to their mother, who lives in Durham, and has breast cancer that is most likely terminal. Continue reading →