human rights

Comment of the Day: “America’s Untouchables”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Among the many provocative, informative and heart-breaking comments to the Ethics Alarms post about the continued persecution of convicted sex offenders after they have completed their sentences is the following Comment of the Day by Peekachu (not to be confused with the Pokemon of the same name—different spelling). This is obviously an emotional topic for many, and I am somewhat surprised that there have not been any comments in defense of the increasingly restrictive limits placed on the Constitutional rights of sex offenders to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….perhaps because there is no defense.  I hope to explore this issue more thoroughly in the future, but in the meantime, I urge readers to visit the other comments to the original post, and also to read Ethics Bob Stone’s take on the topic.

Here is the Comment of the Day, by Peekachu, on “America’s Untouchables”: Continue reading →

America’s Untouchables

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Americans allow prisoners in its penitentiaries to get raped, despite the fact that it is a blatant violation of the prisoners’ civil rights. They even tolerate TV shows making light of the situation, which is a human rights scandal: how many times have you heard the FBI agent or police in shows like “Law and Order” or “The Mentalist” taunt an arrested criminal with the prospect that he will soon be a prison sex-toy? Never mind: American don’t really care about the abuse of prisoners. Similarly, the nation is systematically making it impossible for convicted sex offenders who have served their time to live a normal life anywhere. They might as well be in prison. Well, except then they might get raped. Continue reading →

In the Aftermath of Biden’s Human Rights Betrayal, Little Integrity From The Media

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, Ethics Alarms has been searching for a political progressive, here or anywhere, who will acknowledge the blatant pro-liberal, pro-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Tea Party bias of the mainstream media. Obvious examples are routinely explained or rationalized away, even when they are criticized by a media outlet’s own internal ombudsmen and ethicists.

The media’s coverage of the recent toadying remarks of Vice-President Biden to the Chinese, as he gave a pass to China’s  long-time policy of limiting families to one child, has been a particularly vivid and disgraceful case in point. Despite the fact that Biden’s remarks were a shocking diplomatic gaffe and human rights betrayal, they were almost solely criticized by Republicans and conservative pundits, and only fleetingly covered at all by the mainstream media. While the so-called “conservative media” kept Biden’s gaffe in the news, the rest either covered the coverage, as in “Right Wing Critics Attack Biden,” or framed the criticism of Biden as a pro-life vs. pro-choice dust-up, as if anyone but a lunatic could describe a program limiting births by law  as “pro choice.” Continue reading →

Biden’s China Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Homer Simpson made some comments in China yesterday,,,wait, my mistake. It was Joe Biden.

I saw the transcript of the Vice President’s remarks in China yesterday, and several thoughts went through my mind:

 How craven. How callous.What a betrayal of decency and American values!

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 This is what happens when a once-great country is a trillion dollars  in debt to a human rights monster.

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I hesitate to speculate what other nations that look to the U.S. as the champion of human rights must think when they hear the American Vice-President call forced abortion “a policy which I thoroughly understand.” Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The U.S. Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

To be more accurate, the heroic component in this instance is the liberal wing of SCOTUS ( Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsberg, and Breyer) plus the swing vote, Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in Brown v. Plata.  The decision upheld a court order requiring California to release a staggering 46, 000 inmates of its prisons, more than a fourth of the those sentenced there. The majority concurred with the lower court’s assessment that California prisons were so obscenely over-crowed that conditions amount to a human rights violation and a breach of the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Some Supreme Court decisions come down to ethics as much as law, and this was certainly one of those times. At issue from a legal standpoint was  whether federal judges had the power to order the release of state prisoners as a necessary means of curing a constitutional violation. But the brilliant legal minds on the conservative side of the Court’s divide had no problem answering that question in the negative, and persuasively too.  The dilemma is that California’s least sympathetic citizens, its residents of the state’s penal institutions, are being kept in conditions that violate their constitutional rights, and despite many years of knowing about the problem, the state hasn’t found a way to rectify it. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sen. John McCain

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Arizona Senator John McCain has seriously tarnished his reputation for integrity  since losing the Presidential election in 2008, particularly during his last campaign for re-election to the Senate. The best of McCain was on display this week, however, as he delivered a strong and eloquent denouncement of torture (a.k.a “enhanced interrogation techniques”) on the Senate floor, in response to the ethically offensive arguments being put forth by many conservatives that the successful elimination of Osama bin Laden somehow magically transformed the evil practice of torture into a respectable tactic of national security. It is an important, courageous and persuasive statement from a U.S. Senator with special qualifications to make it, as one who had been tortured himself, and as fine a legacy as McCain, or any Senator, could aspire to.

Sen. McCain said, in part (you can read the entire text of his speech here)…

“Mr. President, the successful end of the ten-year manhunt to bring Osama bin Laden to justice has appropriately heightened the nation’s appreciation for the diligence, patriotism and courage of our armed forces and our intelligence community.  They are a great credit and inspiration to the country that has asked so much of them, and like all Americans, I am in their debt.

“But their success has also reignited debate over whether the so-called, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ of enemy prisoners, including waterboarding, were instrumental in locating bin Laden, and whether they are necessary and justifiable means for securing valuable information that might help prevent future terrorist attacks against us and our allies and lead to the capture or killing of those who would perpetrate them.  Or are they, and should they be, prohibited by our conscience and laws as torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Continue reading →

Would It Be Ethical To Prohibit Civicly Ignorant Citizens From Voting?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

CNN columnist L.Z. Granderson made the argument in a recent website post that it would be reasonable to deny the right to vote to ignorant Americans who cannot name the three branches of government and who have nary a clue about the issues facing the country .

Granderson could have saved some time by simply writing the undoubted truth that American policies, progress and choices of leaders and are greatly handicapped by the fact that lazy, uninformed, blissfully ignorant boobs warp our democratic process….and have almost from the beginning. But so what? What can be done about it? There is one thing for certain: taking away the right to vote based on someone’s subjective formula for measuring “ignorance” isn’t among the realistic—or ethical—solutions. Continue reading →

United Nations Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

After the U.N., Plan B

Ah, the United Nations—can’t live with it, can’t live without it!

 

But I think it may be time for the U.S., having tried to live with a corrupt, hypocritical, impotent monument to how disastrous a one-world government would be—while supplying the lion’s share of its funding— to try living without it.

The U.N. Human Rights Council has issued a 23-page report praising the Gaddafi regime’s human-rights record. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Mr. Obama has spoken only once in public about the Libyan crisis. He has yet to condemn Mr. Gaddafi by name. He has not called for an end to the regime. He has expressed concern about protecting U.S. citizens – most of whom were evacuated from Libya on Friday – but has showed no intention of protecting the Libyans whom Mr. Gaddafi is slaughtering. The White House appears content to allow France and other nations to take the lead. But the reality is that as long as the president of the United States remains passive, the help Libyans are begging for will not come.”

—-The Washington Post, in an Editorial entitled “A Passive President”

President Obama is unilaterally abdicating the United States’ critical and honorable role as the world’s advocate for freedom and human rights. As President Obama calculated the political angles, people are dying at the hands of a mad dictator. He has condemned the Governor of Wisconsin with more intensity than he has Libya’s butcher.

There are certain sacred duties of being President Of the United States, and this one doesn’t apparently sit well with Obama’s famous “reserve.” It is the duty to lead the World to oppose evil, and he is ducking it as people die.

Cheers to the Washington Post for noticing, caring, and speaking out.

UPDATE: 2/26/11 The same day the Post ran its editorial, the White House announced that the President told Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel that “when a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now.” I suppose that covers “He has not called for an end to the regime” part of the Post’s indictment, though someone has to explain to me why Obama is condemning the Libyan dictator without mentioning his name ,and weirder still, only doing so by reporting what he has said to the German Chancellor.

Egypt Ethics: Integrity Deficit on the Right

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It has been fascinating and troubling listening to conservative radio talk-show host Mark Levin lambast fellow conservatives who have been siding with the revolutionaries trying to end the 30 year rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Levin argues that such support is foolish and ignorant, because there is no way for the United States to be sure that the resulting new government, even if it is more democratic than the current one (hardly a difficult bar to clear), wouldn’t be worse for the interests of the United States. Continue reading →