Islam

The Ethics Of The Ground Zero Mosque

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The proposed Ground Zero mosque should be a straightforward ethics issue, but it is not. Now it is bound up in a thoroughly confusing  debate that confounds and blurs law, ethical values, history, rights, and human nature.  Everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.

Yes, it’s an Ethics Train Wreck, all right. This one is so bad I hesitated to write about it—ethics train wrecks trap commentators too—in the vain hope that it would somehow resolve itself with minimal harm. That is obviously not in the cards, however; not when the Anti-Defamation League weighs in on the side of religious intolerance, thus forfeiting its integrity and warping its mission. The wreck is still claiming victims, and there is no end in sight. Continue reading →

The Emmys, “South Park,” and Integrity

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Muslim extremist threat that cowed the Comedy Channel into censoring South Park has certainly spawned a bumper crop of unethical attempts at protest. First we had the juvenile “Let’s Insult Islam Because We Can Day” protest, better known as “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” which made a lot of completely innocent and law-abiding Muslims upset without accomplishing anything else—not even a good laugh. Now the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, admittedly never a bastion of fairness, honesty or integrity, has made its incoherent protest by nominating the two “South Park” episodes that were censored for. Neither has been viewed intact on Comedy Central, nor are either viewable online. Nonetheless, the Academy says these episodes are among the “best animated programs,” despite the fact that the programs, in the forms that supposedly warrant the honor, have never been seen. Continue reading →

Comedy Central’s Unethical Self-Censorship

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

—–Evelyn Beatrice Hall (describing Voltaire’s attitude toward freedom of speech.)

“We will defend to the death your right to say anything to get a laugh, unless you are threatened by religious zealots and terrorists, in which case we will fold like Bart Stupak in an origami competition.”

—–Ethics Alarms (describing Comedy Central’s attitude toward freedom of speech.)

Continue reading →

“Raving Private Gump”: Tom Hanks Lets Political Correctness Eat His Brains, and Gets Called On It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I am a big fan of Tom Hanks’ work as an a comic, a dramatic actor, a producer, and in drag, but he has been reliably attached to what may end up being the most infuriating quote of the year. If not the most infuriating, then at least the most ignorant and irresponsible.  In an interview with historian Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine feature about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific, Hanks said this:

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

If you are not now running in circles, wide-eyed and screaming, you should be. Continue reading →

Protest Ethics: Christmas, the ACLU, and Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

A silly e-mail is circulating again, as it has this time of year since 2005, encouraging recipients to engage in a pointless and ignorant protest against the American Civil Liberties Union.

It reads: Continue reading →