gays

Comment of the Day: “The Ethicists, Backing Judge Walker and Gay Marriage, At An Unacceptable Price”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The motion to vacate Judge Walker’s ruling on Proposition 8 has been filed, you can read it here. Since the original post, I have detected some cracks in the formerly near-united front of legal ethicists and journalists deriding Walker’s critics. Some of them are finally, grudgingly, admitting that the Judge might not have handled his potential conflict so well after all, and that the motion is not a frivolous, anti-gay outrage as they originally labelled it.  The most rickety of the rationalizations put forth on Walker’s behalf, advanced by some his most respected defenders, is that he had no obligation to reveal his own sexual orientation by disclosing his domestic arrangement because of its intimate and private nature. Yet the judge voluntarily disclosed it after his decision was in the books, raising a rebuttable presumption that his original silence was to avoid suggestions of conflict, not out of a desire for privacy.

First time commenter Jada adds her Comment of the Day to the discussion: Continue reading →

The Ethicists, Backing Judge Walker and Gay Marriage, At An Unacceptable Price

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

"Oh, all right...as long as we like the decision."

Thanks to the Judge Walker controversy, now have proof that the best legal ethicists in the nation are human. I suppose that’s something.

My colleagues in the legal ethics field are arguing—decreeing, really— that Judge Vaughn Walker’s decade-long same-sex relationship didn’t need to be disclosed before he ruled against Proposition 8 (California’s voter-approved gay marriage ban) because, they say, it created no reasonable doubts about his impartiality. Coincidentally, they also really, really like his decision. But then, so do I. Continue reading →

Why I Hate Hate Crime Laws

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Just do it with love, and they'll be lenient...

I did it to myself, I confess: reminding myself of the nation’s offensive hate crime laws while writing about the McDonald’s beating, pausing in the middle of the main theme of the post to note the foolishness of investigating whether or not an unprovoked attack qualifies as a hate crime. Hate crime laws infuriate me every time I think about them, because they represent the lowest and most cynical form of cultural values-setting by lawmaking, an important governmental task that is increasingly a lost art, because today’s lawmakers care more about posturing and power than values.

Two unidentified men beat Bryan Stow, a 42-year-old paramedic, senseless in the parking lot outside Dodger Stadium on opening day. Why? He was wearing a San Francisco Giant jersey, and it was Dodger territory. Continue reading →

E-Mail Revelations: Prof. Ellen Lewin’s Unprofesssional Intolerance

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Ellen Lewin, a University of Iowa Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, was so enraged by an e-mail invitation sent to the entire campus by the student Republican group that she fired off an e-mail in reply that said, succinctly,

“FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS!”

The young Republicans circulated the e-mail, and now many people  and groups are calling for her dismissal. The incident has raised more ethical questions than mere civility. Continue reading →

Judge Walker Was Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Now that we know about Bert, should Judge Ernie have recused himself?

Judge Vaughn Walker, the Federal District judge who a year ago ruled California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages, unconstitutional, was wrong. No, not about the law, which is pretty clearly unconstitutional: his opinion was fair and well-reasoned, and is likely to be upheld on appeal. Walker was ethically wrong in his handling of the delicate issue of his own sexuality, which had raised a controversy about his objectivity and ability to be impartial.

Two weeks ago, following his retirement from the bench, Walker publicly disclosed for the first time that he has been in a same-sex relationship for the past ten years. This changes the analysis regarding the propriety of his ruling on Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Walker had long been rumored to be gay; supposedly “everybody” knew he was gay. My position, as well as that of many others considering the arguments of anti-gay marriage opponents that he should recuse himself, was that sexual orientation could not and should not create a presumption of bias, any more than gender, age, race or marital status. Continue reading →

Cindy McCain Shows Us What the Absence of Integrity Looks Like

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

What sense can we make out of the conduct of Cindy McCain, Senator John McCain’s wife?

In a celebrity video ad, posted online by a gay rights group called NOH8, Cindy McCain has properly linked the bullying of gay teens (and the recent spate of gay teen suicides) with the second-class citizen, undesirable human being status attached to gays by politicians who support the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Then, as the media began speculating about the policy rift in the McCain household, since Sen. McCain still supports the archaic, unconstitutional and unjust policy that forces gays to hide their sexual orientation or be deemed unfit for military service, Cindy McCain sent out a Twitter message that read:

“I fully support the NOH8 campaign and all it stands for and am proud to be a part of it. But I stand by my husband’s stance on DADT.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Carl Paladino

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Carl Paladino now says he is a big supporter of gay rights, which in his case means that despite the fact that he considers their sexual orientation “invalid,” he still feels that, l ike child molesters and criminals, they deserve basic Constitutional rights…except gay marriage, of course.

The GOP candidate for governor of New York chose a day just barely removed from a series of vicious attacks on gay men, and just a couple of weeks after a gay Rutgers student was humiliated into suicide by a cruel “prank,” to proclaim to a gathering of Hasidic Jews that he does not want children to be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option,” and criticized his opponent, Andrew  Cuomo, for marching in the city’s Gay Pride parade, saying,”I didn’t march in the Gay Pride parade this year. My opponent did. And that’s not the example that we should be showing our children and certainly not in our schools.” But Mr. Paladino isn’t homophobic; oh no!  He just thinks  children should be taught that they shouldn’t hang around with gays, like, you know, lepers, winos, and cannibals. Continue reading →

Chris Plante and the Cupcakes: Why You Can’t Trust Talk Show Hosts

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A new Gallup poll shows that the public’s trust in news media has plunged to discouraging new (but completely deserved) levels. One of the side effects of this, the inevitable and correct result of  the incompetence, arrogance and bias of journalists and editors every single day, is that the public has begun to trust even less trustworthy sources. For example, a large proportion of twenty-somethings get their primary news information from the Daily Show, which is today’s equivalent of using Bob Hope’s monologues as a current events resource. This is foolish beyond words, because Jon Stewart’s professional obligation is to be entertaining, provocative and funny, not fair, accurate, or responsible. Indeed, if he has an opportunity to make a hilarious joke and doesn’t do it because it would require distorting the truth, he’s breaching a professional duty. He’s accountable to no one; he has no ethical standards to meet. It is unfair to rely on Jon Stewart for the news. He doesn’t want your trust: don’t trust him.

Others…older, but no wiser…go to public issue talk shows as their primary news sources. These people are not journalists either. They may be lawyers, former military men, spooks, authors, agitators, stealth political candidates,  or pundits; they may also be comedians, satirists, blowhards, ignoramuses, idiots, misanthropes, radicals, cynics, phonies or bigots. Among their ranks are too many agendas to count, in addition to those they all share: they want you to listen to them and adopt their views of the world. Those agendas are not conducive to truth either.

Some of the talk show hosts are less trustworthy than others. Take Chris Plante, for example—a B-list conservative talk show host whose primary tools are smugness and mockery. Continue reading →

The Ethics Hero Odd Couple: Ann Coulter and Howard Dean

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Two impolitic, frequently uncivil, ideologically zealous and widely disliked public figures just picked up Ethics Hero credentials by bucking the worst tendencies of their natural political allies, and making a stand for more understanding and less mindless partisan combat.

First, Ann Coulter, the political commentator/performance artist whose acid comments about the liberal establishment would make Rush Limbaugh blush: She was kicked off the bill for the ultra-conservative WorldNetDaily’s “Taking America Back Conference” in Miami because she agreed to speak at Homocon, an event organized by gay Republican group GOProud. Continue reading →

San Jose State, Blood, and Misguided Ethical Absolutism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Food and Drug Administration will not permit you to donate blood if you have engaged in certain high risk activities associated with a greater likelihood of contracting the HIV virus.  This includes same-sex intimate relations between men. “FDA’s policies on donor deferral for history of male sex with males date back to 1983, when the risk of AIDS from transfusion was first recognized,” says the agency’s website. “A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for the presence of and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

Officials at San Jose State University regard this as invidious discrimination against gays.  For that reason, the University has banned blood drives at the school in protest of the F.D.A. policy since 2008, and has announced that the ban will continue. The school’s logic is simple, or perhaps simple-minded. Banning men who have sex with men from donating blood constitutes discrimination, and discrimination is always bad. Thus San Jose State, a good school that abhors discrimination, will maintain its virtue by refusing to participate in a discriminatory practice. Continue reading →