Things are not as simple as the Babylon Bee would have us think. Ethics Alarms already posted two essays on this case, here and here. The latter, a Comment of the Day by Tim Levier, concluded by describing the protesters and demonstrators thusly:
The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone with whom they have no prior connection.
These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.
Clancy’s trial, presumably the first of two (at least), ended in a mistrial yesterday due to a hung jury. A single juror, widely believed to be one of the three men on the 12 juror panel, was apparently refusing to budge from his unshakable belief that the woman who has confessed to murdering her three children is guilty of murder. I dunno, that seems like a defensible verdict to me, but I wasn’t in the courtroom during the trial.
But I digress. Here are recent ethics-related developments and observations:
There has been so much weird, impulsive, counter-intuitive and counter-factual support for frauds, knaves and evil-doers on the ideological left that I have had a hard time keeping up with it—or maybe my brain is just rejecting what it regards as bad juju. An astounding number of young Democratic-Socialists lionize Luigi Mangione, who shot an insurance exec in the back in an alley. Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, now the Michigan Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly expressed his approval of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I have several Trump-Deranged friends who would have sent metaphorical flowers of thanks to any of the recent failed assassins whose target was President Trump. The support for Jason Arday and his sanctification as a victim is also part of the trend.
But this latest example is special. Hundreds of women, dressed in pink, protested last week outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts to show their support for Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse being tried for the murder of her three young children.
The mob wore shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defense now is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Okay. That’s the defense’s job in a case like this, and surely any mother who would murder her own kids, or any children for that matter, has a strong argument that she was legally insane. However, in 1994 when Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, by strapping them in their car seats, and rolling her car into a lake, there was no such public sympathy for her. The defense’s insanity defense was rejected by the jury.
Social media, of course, is part of the difference, and the Clancy episode may stand as a perfect example of how the internet warps values, perception and ethics. The murderous mother’s sympathizers have followed the livestreamed trial daily, often analyzing witness testimony in real time. TikTok has viral videos with legends like “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” often showing the poster holding her own infant. (I would think such videos justify visist from child protective services.) “I Stand With Lindsay” merchandise—shirts, hats, stickers, mugs, socks and bags —-are being sold on line. A GoFundMe established for Clancy’s parents had 31,000 contributions by the end of last week, raising over a million dollars.
This woman murdered her children, remember, and there is evidence that she planned it; she didn’t just “snap.”
So Ethics Alarms has to ask the threshold question to begin an inquiry into so many ethics problems: “What’s going on here?”
I have two simple questions for pro-abortion (or perhaps “pro mothers and doctors being able to kill viable infants at will” is a more accurate label…a bit long, I admit) advocates.
How can you honestly and sincerely defend the new Massachusetts abortion law? If you can, how do you look yourself in the mirror or sleep at night?
Abortion will now be allowed at any time before birth in Massachusetts after Governor Maura Healey (D, or course: what other party would do this?) eliminated the state’s abortion limits yesterday. Previously, the Bay State had allowed abortion only up until 24 weeks. Now a fully developed unborn infant can be killed any time during the 40-week gestation cycle, even second before birth. That means that the child could be delivered via C-section and instantly be protected by law as a living human being, but an unborn infant at the exact same state of development and fully viable can be murdered in the womb after the mother’s water has broken and contractions have begun.
To be fair, now, the home of my birth and happy childhood isn’t the only barbaric state with such an immoral law. Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia of course, also believe that being able to kill living and viable infants in the womb is a human “right.” Peter Singer, the Princeton ethics professor, once caused an uproar when he said that as long as we were allowing abortions up to birth, why not let the mother see her baby first after it is born and then have the option to kill it? He was right: morally and ethically, either homicide is exactly the same. The distinction between born and unborn at that point is arbitrary and a legal fiction, created to let mothers feel better about a monstrous act.
The toxic wokism that oozes out of Harvard and the other educational institutions in the Bay State have finally infected Massachusetts to the point where the it is too deranged even for the long-time Democratic Party’s mouthpiece, the Boston Globe. The propaganda rag that hasn’t endorsed a Republican President since… hmmmm, never, actually, though it has occasionally endorsed Republicans for governor if they sounded and acted like Democrats…issued an editorial this week headlined, “Massachusetts can’t handle the influx of migrants on its own.” Good ol’ Globe: it can’t stop spinning for the Left even when its criticizing it. The issue is illegal immigrants, not “migrants.” And it’s not an influx: it’s a completely predictable occupation in response to persistent invitations.
Two days ago, the Legislature passed a bill granting in-state tuition at public colleges for all illegal immigrants who graduate from Massachusetts high schools, where they shouldn’t be allowed to attend in the first place. State Rep. Paul Frost, a Republican, rose to make the obvious critical observation about the measure, saying, “This is another incentive to encourage more illegal immigration to the Commonwealth, that the taxpayers and the residents of Massachusetts will have to subsidize.”
In my home state of Massachusetts, the town of Southborough’s comment policy at town meetings partially read: “All remarks and dialogue in public meetings must be respectful and courteous, free of rude, personal or slanderous remarks. Inappropriate language and/or shouting will not be tolerated.” Southborough resident Louise Barron was accused of violating the civility policy during a town meeting and was threatened with physical removal before she left on her own accord.
In her remarks to the board, Barron had said the town was “spending like drunken sailors” and that the town board had violated the state’s open meetings law. A town official warned Barron against slandering town officials, telling her that the public comment session would be stopped. Barron refused to back down. “Look, you need to stop being a Hitler.” Barron said. “You’re a Hitler. I can say what I want.”
The board called a recess, and told Barron that she would be escorted from the meeting if she didn’t leave, precipitating her exit. That action by the Southborough government, Justice Scott L. Kafker of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote, violated protections for freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, according to the Court’s ruling handed down on March 7. His majority opinion held,
“Although civility, of course, is to be encouraged, it cannot be required regarding the content of what may be said in a public comment session of a governmental meeting. What can be required is that the public comment session be conducted in an ‘orderly and peaceable’ manner, including designating when public comment shall be allowed in the governmental meeting, the time limits for each person speaking, and rules preventing speakers from disrupting others and removing those speakers if they do.”
[You know, writing this blog of late has made me feel like I’m Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill I,” fighting O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) personal army, The Crazy 88’s. The ethics stories just get worse and worse, especially from the world of government and politics, and they keep on coming. The mission of this blog is to, in some small way, try to encourage ethical analysis and sensitivity in the culture of a nation uniquely dependent on it, and all I see is the ethics in our culture, especially in the professions (which exist to be trusted) and our institutions (all of them) deteriorating rapidly and seemingly deliberately. The effort feels hopeless. Maybe a better analogy than The Bride’s mass battle in “Kill Bill I” is Viking king Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) fighting gleefully and futilely in a pit full of hungry wolves in “The Vikings.” After all, Uma wins her fight. But Ethics Alarms is not directed by Quentin Tarantino.
What prompts these musings? This item from the State of my birth: Massachusetts Democrats have offered a bill giving prison inmates reduced sentences when they donate their kidneys and bone marrow. State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez and Judith Garcia came up with this monstrosity, which aims to create “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program” within the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Prisoners would be able to shave between 60 days to a year off their sentences.
Talk about killing bills—I’d love that bill as a hypothetical in an ethics class, though I would think it might be too easy for anyone old enough to vote. In The Guardian’s story, we read that the bill “has raised ethical concerns.” YA THINK???Continue reading →
No, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused to allow Lionel Porter to become a lawyer because while he was in the midst of flunking all those bar exams, he practiced law without a license. The April 22 opinion explains.
I am stunned that any state, especially my home state of Massachusetts (where I passed the bar the first time despite studying for it almost always while listening or watching the Red Sox drive to the 1975 pennant) would allow anyone to take the bar exam that many times. It’s just not that hard, especially since Mass. went to the all-multiple choice Multi-State exam. I knew and know a lot of lawyers, and only one flunked the bar. That was my father, who took the exam the first time without studying just to see how he would do. (He just missed passing.) Continue reading →
Do we really have more elected officials at the local, state and national levels who are spectacularly ignorant of basic civics and the U.S. Constitution, or does it just seem that way?
How typical is this idiot/totalitarian of Democrats generally?
How can anyone trust, never mind vote for, someone who thinks she won’t be pilloried for stating that government power should not be constrained by laws?
Incompetent elected officials like this are far, far more dangerous than Joy Behar, who thinks the Supreme Court passes bills. All Joy does is talk on TV. Sabadosa is in a position where her ignorance and fondness for government dictatorship can do real damage.
If there is any American whose birthday should be a national holiday, it is George Washington, born this day in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. If I have to tell you the reasons he was “the essential man” in American history, well, I guess you’re the product of our current public school system, a recent college graduate, a Democrat, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast, or something. There is no rational excuse for every American, yes, even African-Americans, to not be grateful for this day. Martin Luther King is now the only individual to have a national holiday dedicated to his honor, while Washington’s memory was dumped into a hodge-podge of lesser figures including Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison and now, Donald Trump. King is worthy of his day, but to honor King over Washington is as good an example of “putting the cart before the horse” as one could find. Shame on us. True, George is not lacking honors, with the capital city named for him, a towering monument, cities and towns in many states, Mt. Rushmore, and his image on both the most-used bill and coin. Nonetheless he earned all of it, and this date should be a holiday.
On The Ethics Alarms home page, you will see to your right a link to the list of ethical habits some historians believe made Washington the remarkably trustworthy and ethical man he was, ultimately leading his fellow Founders to choose him, and not one the many more brilliant, learned and accomplished among them, to take on the crucial challenge of creating the American Presidency. Directed to do so by his father, young Washington copied out by hand and committed to memory a list called “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” It was based on a document compiled by French Jesuits in 1595; neither the authors nor the English translator and adapter are known today. The elder Washington was following the teachings of Aristotle—another Dead White Man whom most Americans alive today couldn’t tell you Jack S-word about— who held that principles and values began as being externally imposed by authority (morals) and eventually became internalized as character. As I wrote when I first posted them here,
The theory certainly worked with George Washington. Those ethics alarms installed by his father stayed in working order throughout his life. It was said that Washington was known to quote the rules when appropriate, and never forgot them. They did not teach him to be a gifted leader he became, but they helped to make him a trustworthy one.
Would that readers would access that list more often. And politicians. And lawyers. And educators…
1. How ignorant and ungrateful? THIS ignorant and ungrateful…
1. Let’s start with some good news! In April of last year, I wrote about Massachusetts judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, who was charged with obstruction of justice, along with another court officer, for helping an illegal immigrant (and criminal) elude arrest by the ICE. The story is here. It looks like the judge is going to trial.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin has now denied the judge’s lawyers’ motions to dismiss in a July ruling. “After careful consideration, the motions to dismiss are DENIED because the Indictment alleges the elements of the offenses and sufficient supporting factual detail,” he wrote . Joseph’s attorneys are claiming was that she is protected by judicial immunity, though that should only apply to actions a judge engages in under judicial authority and in the course of her duties. Instructing a court employee to help an illegal immigrant evade being taken into custody by ICE agents after his hearing on criminal charges, including drug possession, is not known as “being a judge.” It is known as “obstructing justice.” Even if the judge avoids punishment, her days as a judge are over.
Good.
2. What’s this? MORE good news? I have been looking for cracks in the monolithic mainstream media, with defections by individuals in the midst of the journalism’s abandonment of its duties to democracy in favor of news manipulation and partisanship. Less than a month ago, New York Timed editor Bari Weiss called out the oppressive culture of partisanship and conformity at the her paper, earning her Ethics Hero status.
Last month MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary quit the network, arguably the most unethical of all the broadcast news outlets, and yesterday she published a blog post explaining why. “I simply couldn’t stay there anymore.” She wrote:
“My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis….It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate,’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done…I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it’s particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
She claims to want to be part of a solution to this dire situation. We shall see. I reached out to her in an email yesterday, offering my guidance and expertise, gratis of course.
3. On the theory that transparency is good news, it was nice to see Democratic Rep. Karen Bass, supposedly one of the top contenders to be Joe Biden’s running mate, demonstrate how dim-witted she is and unqualified to be President, though at this point even she could probably beat poor Joe Biden in a spelling bee. Over and over, on several Sunday news shows, she repeated her previous explanation for praising Fidel Castro , telling Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” for example, regarding calling the brutal dictator’s death a “great loss to the people of Cuba,” that she “wouldn’t do that again. Talked immediately to my colleagues from Florida and realized that that was something that just shouldn’t have been said.”
Astounding. She wouldn’t say that what she said was wrong, outrageous for a member of Congress and demonstrated inexcusable ignorance, but that she should have kept the opinion to herself. Todd, of course, being one of the worst hacks in captivity, didn’t bother to press her on the point for the benefit of members of his audience who can’t recognize signature significance when it’s right in front of them.
Biden, or whoever his ventriloquist is, is officially trapped in ethics zugzwang. The only reason Bass is even being considered is that Biden has to select a black (George Floyd!) woman (#MeToo!) as his VP, and all of his remaining options are horrible by any objective standard. This will be a flaming lesson in the foolishness of placing physical characteristics over ability, experience and character, a perfect example of why affirmative action doesn’t work and will never work. Bass is a light-weight, but Biden’s two other options are Kamala Harris ( whose ugly Ethics Alarms dossier is here), and <ack! choke! yecch! barf! gag!> the even more horrible Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s ethics-free acolyte. Her dossier is here. She would be the most sinister Vice-President candidate since Aaron Burr.
I have to poll this: Who is Joe’s best choice among this unethical trio?
I’m not going to allow “None of the above,” because I don’t think he has that option, or at least doesn’t have the integrity to insist on choosing a qualified candidate who has the wrong tint or chromosomes.
4. Finally, to end on a downer, the Unethical Non-Trump Tweet of the week. Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac was the only NBA player not to kneel during the National Anthem, and also refused to wear a “Black Lives Matter” warm-up like the rest of his teammates. In Sunday’s game, he tore his ACL, a season-ending and career threatening injury. ESPN radio host Dan Le Batard then ran a poll on Twitter asking, “Is it funny the guy who refused to kneel immediately blew out his knee?”
When the poll was pulled, about 45% of respondents said that it was funny, which tells you all you need to know about NBA fans and Black Lives Matter supporters—the genuine kind, not the grovelers. Le Batard issued a phony apology, Level 10 on the Apology Scale.
“We apologize for this poll question,” he wrote. “I said on the front and back end of the on-air conversation that I didn’t think it was funny. Regardless of the context, we missed the mark. We took the tweet down when we realized our mistake in how we posed the question to the audience.”
Lies and more lies. They took the tweet down when it was clear they were getting slammed for it. If he didn’t think a young athlete getting injured was funny because he dared to oppose the BLM mob, why would he think anyone else would? When is someone getting hurt who has done nothing wrong and who did not do something foolish to cause the injury ever funny?
Ethics Alarms 