ethics

The Homophobic Counselor, the Ethical Bigot, and the One-Legged Tarzan

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Jennifer Keeton was expelled from the graduate program at Georgia’s Augusta State University in 2010 because her Christian religious convictions dictate that homosexuality is sinful and voluntary conduct, rather than an innate sexual orientation. A court upheld the school’s right to expel her on the basis that her beliefs made it impossible for her to meet their counseling standards, which the court ruled were neutral, and did not discriminate against her speech or religion.

The case may raise legitimate constitutional issues. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative legal group, and Constitutional Law professor Eugene Volokh (of Volokh Conspiracy fame) are assisting Keaton as she attempts to get reinstated. Ethically, however, I don’t think she has a leg to stand on.
In fact, I think her position resembles the old Dudley Moore-Peter Cook comedy routine where Moore is one-legged amputee who cries foul at being “discriminated against” by a film director who refuses to consider him for the role of Tarzan:

Similarly, how can a counselor claim to be able to provide full and competent services when her attitude toward gays dictates an unsympathetic, hostile and scientifically discredited point of view? Continue reading →

An Ethics Alarms Milestone

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

At 5: 14, EST, Ethics Alarms passed one million in total views since it was launched in late October of 2009.

I know that there are plenty of blogs that top that total in a week or less, but never mind: this blog is about ethics, which means, unfortunately, that it isn’t likely to attract a whopping readership…just a smart, caring and thoughtful one.

Thanks, everybody.

Dishonest Headline of the Week: The Blaze

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Whatever You Do, Do Not Watch This Video of a Stomach-Turning Track Injury!”

Res ipsa loquitur!

_________________________

Source: The Blaze

Comment of the Day: “Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Glenn Logan scores the Comment of the Day with his answer to the questions I posed in my open letter to Colbert King, the anti-corruption Washington Post columnist who nonetheless regards Congress’s inquiry into a possible Fast and Furious cover-up as trivial. He also penned a worthy candidate for ethics quote of the week: watch for the last sentence, which I bolded. Love it, Glenn!

I’ll have some additions to Glenn’s thoughts at the end; meanwhile, here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King.” Continue reading →

Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Dear Colbert King…

Dear Mr. King:

I am writing to see if you can help me understand your attitude toward the Fast and Furious scandal, as laid out in your recent weekly column in the Washington Post.

I can’t bring myself to make you an Ethics Dunce, because few journalists in any community have led such a relentless and powerful crusade against unethical government and corrupt public officials. Your columns have eloquently condemned the culture of corruption that has crippled the District of Columbia, and rallied the indignation and activism of citizens against the legacy of Marion Barry and the tolerance of public betrayal that he sowed and nurtured. You have cataloged, in shocking detail, the ethical rot that has infested the nation’s Capital, marked by lawlessness, cronyism, incompetence and greed. I respect you. I trust you. I think of you as the most credible and objective media advocate for good government that I know.

So I need to understand why you think it is fair and appropriate to call Rep. Issa a “devil” for insisting on transparency, honesty, accountability, and transparency from Attorney General Holder regarding the Fast and Furious fiasco, which left one American and untold Mexicans dead. It is the duty of Congress to exercise oversight over the U.S. government, and if there was ever an episode demanding oversight, this was it. The U.S. Department of Justice allowed the law to be broken, permitted dangerous automatic weapons to cross the border into Mexico and arm the most dangerous thugs in that country (without receiving the permission of Mexico or informing it), and then lost control of both the scheme and the weapons, with fatal results. You always write about maintaining the trust of the public in Washington, D. C. What is more fatal to trust than a law enforcement agency that intentionally allows laws to be broken without accountability? Don’t you believe that public trust in a nation’s Justice Department, its agents, policymakers and leadership is as important as public trust in the D.C. City Council? If you do, why is Issa, in your words, “engaging in cheap political opportunism” by insisting, along with others, such as the scrupulously fair Sen. Grassley, that Holder explain what happened, who was responsible, and what measures have been taken to make sure such an outrageous operation never happens again—beginning with, <gasp!>, firing somebody? Continue reading →

How Parents Are Playing Russian Roulette With Their Children

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Whenever I discuss an incident of astounding incompetence and idiocy by school administrators, I receive indignant protests that such incidents tell us nothing about the trustworthiness of the schools generally, and that any system, even the very best, have anomalous examples of misconduct and poor judgment. Admittedly I am somewhat conditioned by the experiences of my son, which convinced my wife and I to home school him, not for religious reasons, but because we were horrified by the inflexible, often cruel conduct of his teachers, the deceit and cowardice of various school administrators, and the accumulated impact of the inept teaching and oversight on our son’s attitude toward education, authority, institutions, and life in general. Yet even that was before I began recording the steady drumbeat of teachers seducing their students, teachers indoctrinating their students in their own ideological beliefs, schools punishing students for technical violations of badly written and overly broad rules and harshly disciplining children for their communications and activities outside school grounds, in their private lives.

I now believe that any parent who entrusts the welfare and upbringing of their children to today’s schools is playing the equivalent of Russian Roulette, allowing people who have inadequate standards, inadequate training, inadequate judgment and inadequate values to have an opportunity to warp, debase, confuse or otherwise harm the young. I believe this because I am convinced that the public and media are aware of only a small percentage of the misconduct schools and their employees engage in daily.

Take, for example, the experience of photographer Jess Michener. Two of his children were going on a school field trip. It was a sunny day, and his children are fair-skinned and prone to sunburn—one especially, because she has a mild form of albinism. When they came home, the two were so painfully sunburned that he had to take them to the hospital. He writes: Continue reading →

No, THIS Is An Irresponsible Parent

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“MOM???”

Mistie Atkinson, 32, was sentenced to jail for four years and eight months b in Napa County Superior Court, California this week. After police caught her and her 16-year-old son naked together in a motel room, investigators discovered a sex video, made by Mistie, of her giving her own son oral sex. Mom had no contact with her son for 15 years, then tracked him down on Facebook and began sending him sexually provocative photographs.

This is known as “Not only corrupting a minor, but guaranteeing that his psychiatry bill will approach the national debt.”

Naturally Mistie, who has a disturbingly loose grip on concepts like right, wrong,  boundaries, impulse control, fairness, adulthood and personal responsibility, says that she should not have been charged with incest because the attraction between the two was “genetic.”

The one generous and responsible thing Mistie had done for her son his whole life was to keep him as far away from the toxic influences of her warped, self-centered and destructive character as possible. Then she couldn’t even do that.

 

 

________________________________________________

Facts and Graphic: Daily Mail

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

 

Remember, Things Are Better Than They Seem…There’s Photographic Proof!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Much gratitude is due to Buzzfeed for this lovely and timely sequence of  “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity,” of which the photo above is one. Yes, I’m sure one or more may be photoshopped. At this point, I really do not care.

I don’t know about you, but I need a little reinforcement today.

Armstrong’s Unmasking: Better Late Than Never

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Don’t worry, Barry; Lance should be joining you soon.

Well, I guess I  have to hand it to Lance Armstrong, a bit like Ozzie Guillen when he praised Fidel Castro for surviving his dictatorship against all odds. The evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, that Armstrong is a  prohibited drug cheater ( like most successful cyclists) has been mounting for over a decade, and yet he has managed to hold on to much of his prestige and iconic status. Meanwhile, retired baseball slugger Barry Bonds has been reviled, condemned, prosecuted and vilified, by me among many others, for presumed illicit performing enhancing drug use in his sport that is backed by very similar kinds of evidence that  incriminate Armstrong. Yet while Bonds faces the humiliation of being rejected for election to baseball’s Hall of Fame next year when he becomes eligible, despite being the sport’s all-time career home run leader, Armstrong was preparing to race again to cheering throngs  in an upcoming iron man triathlon.

Then came the news, yesterday, that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has brought formal doping charges against him.  No one should underestimate Armstrong’s skill in wiggling off the hook, but this really should settle the issue of whether he is a hero or a manipulative charlatan. He is the latter. Whether he was a good but weak man trapped in a lie, or a sociopathic con man and cheat can be investigated by biographers and sportswriter, and psychologists. The harm that will be done when his false heroism is irrefutably exposed, however, will be the same no matter how Armstrong came about causing it.  His sport will be permanently tarnished beyond recovery. Scores of children and teens will be disillusioned, betrayed into a cynicism about role models and human nature that should only descend later in life. Worst of all,. his example will stand for some as proof that cheating pays. Armstrong, whatever happens to him, will be rich, like Barry Bonds, even if he is disgraced. He will, as my father liked to say, cry all the way to the bank. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Jeffrey Warren

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

You’ve probably heard or read the story by now.

Wait! Maybe he’s Cherokee!

17-year-old Jeffrey Warren rose to accept the $1,000 college scholarship awarded by the local Martin Luther King Senior Citizens Club during seniors night at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, and provoked both laughter and awkward gasps. He was obviously white—as white as Elizabeth Warren—and the scholarship for intended for black students, though Warren didn’t know that when he applied.

Later, Warren decided to give back the money. His family said they didn’t want the African-American women who gave out the award to be foiled in their attempt to help young black scholars, and that it was the right thing to do. I would say that it was a right thing to do, and showed exemplary kindness, compassion, empathy, generosity, charity and altruism. Jeffrey had every right to accept the money. The Club’s requirements were vague, and did not make it clear that he was not eligible when he applied. If he and his parents had wanted to make a political and philosophical statement about the hypocrisy of a race-based scholarship in the name of Martin Luther King, this was an ideal opportunity, and an argument could be made that this would have been the “right” thing to do as well, if not “righter.” Continue reading →