fairness

The Girl Scouts, the Loyal Wife, and “Wisconsin Sickness”

/ Jack Marshall / 138 Comments

Just what I want to see on my daughter's Girl Scout troop leader's husband's website! And you?

The Girl Scouts have been going through a strange period lately. There was the controversy over a transgender troop member, a boy who identified as a girl.  Then it was revealed that the organization’s literature was promoting Media Matters as a means of civic education.  This, however, takes the cake.

Stacy Hintz, a 28-year-old mother from West Bend, Wisconsin,was removed from her volunteer position as a Girl Scout troop leader because of her husband’s website. The site is called Wisconsin Sickness, is slick, professional, unique, and 100% batty. Here is its introduction:

“Whatever the reason, there is a deep and passionate psychosis that runs through the unstable synapses of those of us from Wisconsin, land of serial killers and cannibals. And we’re proud of it. Wisconsin Sickness, a Mental Shed project, is all about bringing the independent, underground Wisconsin scene together and spreading the sickness like a virus.”

And really, that’s nothing: wait until you see the site, which, among other things, celebrates Ed Gein, the serial killer/cannibal/necrophiliac whose horrific crimes and, uh, interior decorating style inspired “Psycho,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and dozens of lesser horror films. Continue reading →

“King Lear” in Connecticutt

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

"Happy 98th birthday, Mom! Now get the hell out of my house."

Perhaps it is not fair to compare 71-year-old Peter Kantorowski to King Lear’s heartless  daughters Regan and Gonoril. After all, Peter says that his 98-year-old mom, Mary, is welcome to stay with him and his wife at their home, but she refuses. Still, Kanterowski, like the Lear girls, is trying to evict an aged parent from her residence after she had signed the property over to him. And even Regan and Goneril didn’t serve their father the King with an eviction notice on his birthday…but that’s what Peter’s gift was to his mother last December.

According to Probate Court records, in 1996 Mary Kantorowski and her husband, John transferred their small, yellow Cape Cod-style house to a trust administered by eldest son Peter on the condition that Mary could live there until her death, and that upon her death the house would go to Peter and his younger brother, Jack. In July of 2005, Peter quitclaimed the house from that trust to another he and his wife set up, giving him ownership, he says, without the prior conditions. A retired taxidermist, Kantorowski swears he is trying to evict his mother from the home she has lived in since 1953 for her own good. “She would be better off living with people her own age,” he told the Connecticut Post.

Well at least he doesn’t want to stuff her. Continue reading →

Gotcha Nation

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

"Don't you see? It's not a lunch, IT'S A SMOKING GUN!!!!!!!"

For once, I wasn’t sucked in on this one, despite multiple nudges from readers. The story was that a pre-schooler’s lunch, lovingly packed by her mom and containing a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, potato chips and apple juice, was vetoed by an elementary school diet-cop, who forced her to get an approved cafeteria lunch that consisted of three chicken nuggets. Then the girl’s mother got a “you’re not properly feeding your child’ notice from the school, and a bill for the cafeteria lunch. Pushed my Drudge, picked up by Fox (“Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced With Nuggets”) and flogged for days by Rush, Sean, Laura, Mark, Bill and the rest of the conservative airwaves and blogosphere, the tale was widely cited as the tipping point of Big Brother unleashed. This was the work of Michelle Obama’s food crusade, and the harbinger of jack-booted indignities to come! Parents told what to feed their kids! The end of Democracy! Barack Obama’s evil plot exposed! Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Strange Case of Mitt Romney and the Posthumous Jewish Baptisms

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m not even sure what the question  should be, but let’s wade into this Twilight Zone dilemma.

"Your mission, Mr. Romney, should you accept it, is to save these dead Jews from vicarious baptism. Your head will explode in 8 seconds..."

Apparently the Mormon Church has been baptizing dead Jews for a  long time. You don’t have to be a Mormon for Mormons to want to save your soul (as I found out when I lived with a Mormon my freshman year in college), so this is undeniably an act of love, if a bit presumptuous. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints performs what they call “proxy baptisms” in order to save ancestors and others who weren’t baptized in life or who were baptized “without proper authority,” and such a baptism can even take place  after a person has died. When the live Jewish community discovered this was going on, and that even Holocaust victims like Anne Frank were getting baptized posthumously, it strenuously objected and negotiated a  baptism cease-fire of sorts, with the Mormons promising  to only proxy baptize dead Jews who were ancestors of Church members. The deal, however, fell through, and lot of deceased Jews are apparently being sent to Mormon Heaven, or somewhere, against their wills.

Thus Ellie Weisel has decided who is responsible for fixing this—whatever it is…Mitt Romney. Weisel has said that Romney should tell his church to cut it out, because, he says, “it’s scandalous.”

So the Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for today is:

If the Mormons believe that baptizing dead Jews saves their souls, do they have any ethical obligation to stop doing it because the Jewish Community, Ellie Weisel, Mitt Romney or anyone else asks them to?

You know what? I don’t think so.I think if the Church made a deal it should keep its promise, but the deal aside: who does this hurt?

I also don’t think it is fair for Ellie Weisel to publicly demand that Mitt Romney throw his weight around in his Church to please another constituency.

Admittedly, however, the weirdness factor here is strong, and it may be blurring my reasoning powers. What do you think?

Our Incompetent Broadcast News Media: A Frustrating Morning With Soledad O’Brien

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Soledad O’Brien, paving the road to Athens

This morning, on CNN, I managed not to change the channel as I usually do when Soledad O’Brien is on the screen. It was a mistake. The long-time CNN anchor is as low as newscasting can sink short of MSNBC when it comes to smugly-biased commentary, and unlike some of MSNBC’s lefty warriors, O’Brien is just not very bright. This doesn’t keep her from visibly wincing, rolling her eyes or winking at the supposedly simpatico viewer when she thinks her opinion is superior to someone she is interviewing, as unprofessional a habit as I have ever seen. She has a job because, I suppose, she is pleasant to look at and exudes confidence, though it is confidence unsupported by any actual skill, insight or knowledge. Continue reading →

Greedo Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Who shot first?

Jedi Emeritus George Lucas betrayed a warped concept of cowboy ethics, self-defense and ethics generally in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview in which he was quizzed about his technological fixes on the original Star Wars trilogy. The topic was the shooting of Greedo in the bar, when Han Solo blasts away at the green, fishy porcupine-like villain, who has a gun pointed at him:

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Lucas’s idea of what constitutes a “cold-blooded killer” runs counter to law, common sense, and ethics. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “‘Who Ya Gonna Call?'” Paranormal Ethics, and the Irony of Same”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation for this. Let's go figure it out in a motel."

The Comment of the Day is an interesting one from Melissa Leath, a psychic who is published on the topic of psychic ethics. She is responding to the recent post here about proposed standards for paranormal investigators.

Her measured response forces me to confront my own ambivalence on this issue. I am, as she says, a skeptic; more than a skeptic, really, as I intellectually am committed to the position that all paranormal, psychic and spiritual phenomenon, including those in the realm of religious believe, are imaginary at best and fraudulent at worst. I would have said “unshakably committed, ” but emotionally, I have to confess am not as sure as I would like to be, or should be. Perhaps I watch too many horror movies. I don’t like Ouija boards, and won’t have the damn things in the house. If my kitchen furniture suddenly rearranged itself like it does in “Poltergeist,” or if my ultra-rational son started telling me that an old man in 1940s clothes kept appearing in his room at night and saying that he was going to hurt him, or if I saw dark, inky shadows crawling up the wall like in “The Grudge,” I can say with conviction that I would not be the one insisting that there must be a rational explanation and hanging around waiting for the bed to start raising off the floor. I would be the one out the door and checking into a motel, and from the safety of which  insisting that there was a rational explanation, but also secretly fearing that my house had been built over a Native American burial ground.

I realize that this is inconsistent and silly.  But I have a good friend who is as normal and sincere as someone can be who is a serious astrologer. And when I see the late Telly Savalas finally tell his personal ghost story in a YouTube clip, after personally watching him refuse to repeat it on TV talk shows for decades because “it was too scary,” I do wonder, even as I rebuke myself for wondering. Knowing that I wonder, however, it is only fair to give Melissa her say.

Here is her “Comment of the Day” on “‘Who Ya Gonna Call?'” Paranormal Ethics, and the Irony of Same.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Legal Profession’s Muddled Standard For ‘Fitness To Practice’”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

...and that's why they wear masks!

Interested Blogger, or “IB,” makes some interesting observations about professional ethics enforcement generally and medical ethics in particular in the Comment of the Day, responding to the post, The Legal Profession’s Muddled Standard For “Fitness To Practice.” Her insight regarding the reasons why professionals are so reluctant to pull the licenses of misbehaving colleagues is astute, I think.  Lawyers and doctors are hesitant to punish individuals for doing something they could imagine themselves doing, though the Golden Rule is  being misapplied. It’s a disturbing thought, but an illuminating one: perhaps John Edwards keeps his law license because other male lawyers think, “Boy, that could happen to me: get smitten by some hot babe in the office, we fool around, she sandbags me on birth control…heck, I might panic. I might try a crazy scheme to cover it up, especially if it was all going to be played up in the tabloids. Poor guy! How can we disbar him?”

Here is IB’s “Comment of the Day”: Continue reading →

In The Catholic Institutions vs Obamacare Showdown, Law and Ethics Trump Morality…And Should

/ Jack Marshall / 118 Comments

The Christian Soldiers are on the wrong side of this argument.

A controversial rule, announced last month as part of President Obama’s health-care overhaul, requires religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals to provide female employees the full range of contraceptive coverage, including contraceptives, the “morning-after pill” and sterilization services. The measure has  Catholic Church-run institutions up in arms over a system that would force them would  to offer plans that contradict their teachings. Catholic bishops have been leading the growing criticism of the rule,  distributing letters and other materials for distribution to millions of worshipers. Talk radio is abuzz with talk of Obama’s escalating “war on religion.” Even the Washington Post editorial staff criticized the move.

Naturally, the Republican-run Congress announced, via Speaker Boehner, that it would protect Freedom of Religion and block the measure with legislation. All in all, it is a spectacular collision of law, morality and ethics the likes of which we seldom see.

As for simple-minded me, I don’t think this is an especially difficult problem from an ethical point of view. Politics? Practicalities? Culture wars? Yes, those are all extremely difficult considerations in this argument, but they are also not my proper realm. The ethics are clear.

President Obama is right. Continue reading →

Old Testament Treatment For The Miramonte Elementary School Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It could be worse; at least no teachers have been turned into pillars of salt.

Following the discovery that two Miramonte Elementary School teachers, Mark Berndt and Martin Springer,  allegedly engaged  in lewd activity with students, Los Angeles Unified School District made the brave decision to replace all teachers and staff, with everyone being re-assigned. Predictably, there have been protests and criticism. The basic argument: it is excessive and unfair. The good teachers, whoever they were, weren’t at fault.

Yes, they were; at least, they were responsible, and share accountability for a culture they were part of. The school district’s decision correctly assumes that when two members of a relatively small teaching staff abuse young children over a long period, something is rotten at the school beyond those teachers. Oversight is lax, administrators are looking the other way, teachers are protecting colleagues or refusing to acknowledge the implications of what they see or hear. There is a substantial chance that the Miramonte Elementary School didn’t just have some proverbial bad apples, but that it had created a culture that encouraged apples to go bad. There can be no certainty that Berndt and Springer were the only abusers on the staff, and the safety of children is at stake. Clear out the school, and wipe out the culture; have new personnel from top to bottom. It is easier to start over with a rotten culture than to try to fix it: this was God’s attitude in the Old Testament, and He had a point. The difference is that He killed off corrupt cultures with floods and fire, or just made them wander in the desert for generations.  Luckily, this isn’t Congress, Wall Street, Hollywood, or Rupert Murdoch’s empire. You can start all over with a school. Continue reading →