rape

In Search of Accountability, Fairness, Justice and a Champion: the Unending Persecution of Anthony Graves

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Job would pity Anthony Graves

Governments and other bureaucracies are capable of unimaginable callousness, stupidity, and wrongful conduct, allowing individual fools to multiply their power to harm exponentially, and then to see an inhuman computer-driven monstrosity run amuck as everyone denies responsibility. You could not devise a better example of this process than what Texas is doing to Anthony Graves.

He is an innocent man convicted of murder in 1994 who was released last October after spending 18 years in prison, condemned to death. He had been convicted with fabricated evidence and coached testimony employed against him by former Burleson County District Attorney Charles Siberia, and a state investigation got a Texas judge to set Graves free. But the maw of Texas bureaucracy wasn’t through ruining his life. Continue reading →

The Conclusion to “Texas Cheerleading Ethics: Cheer Your Rapist” (And You’re Not Going To Like It)

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

"Give me an R! A! P! I! S! T!---RAPIST!!!"

Back in November, Ethics Alarms reported the awful story of the Silsbee, Texas High school cheerleader, identified only as “H.S.”,who was kicked off her cheerleading squad for violating “the Cheerleader Code of Ethics” after she refused to cheer at a game for the player who, it was later determined, had sexually assaulted her. She stood silent in mute protest, and when her parents sued the school, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that H.S.’s silent protest was not protected speech under the First Amendment, meaning that she could be disciplined for violating the cheerleading conduct code.

Now the Supreme Court has turned down the case, refusing to review it, meaning not only that H.S. loses, but also that her parents have to pay court costs and legal defenses to the tune of $45,000.

This is a perfect example of the distinction between the law, justice, and ethics. Continue reading →

Backtracking on Virtual World Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

 

Anything unethical about these guys?

I was wrong.

New technology challenges our ethics because we have no immediate frames of reference to rely on. The situations created by the use of new technology require us to reach back to things we are more familiar with for guidance, and we risk choosing comparisons that prove to be superficial and inaccurate over time. This is the trap I fell into when I first approached the question of whether a player’s misconduct —or rather his avatar’s misconduct—in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life could be unethical. My frame of reference was video games, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons,  and games generally. If engaging in Second Life is analogous to playing a game, then vandalizing someone’s home in cyberspace is no different from invading another player’s country in Risk. If “Warcraft” is essentially similar to playing a video game, then “killing”  an avatar is no more unethical than mowing down enemy soldiers in Medal of Honor.

And if virtual games were fantasies, I reasoned, then declaring anything that took place in their boundaries unethical was tantamount to policing thought. Thoughts are not unethical;  actions are. Case closed, right? Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Florida Legislator Kathleen Passidomo

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yup, the Temple girl was asking for it...

While pushing for a bill mandating a dress code for schools, Florida’s GOP legislator Kathleen Passidomo decided to bolster her argument by linking it the horrendous Texas case in which an eleven-year-old girl was raped by 18 men. She said:

“There was an article about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed up like a 21-year-old prostitute. And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students.”

This woman is too dim-witted to make sandwiches. much less laws.

I don’t care if the 11-year old girl’s parents dressed her  like Christina Aguilara on a particularly slutty day. I don’t care if she looked like Jon Benet Ramsey on estrogen supplements. I don’t care if she looked 15, 17, 22, 31, or 64; I don’t care if she was buck naked and singing “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No.” None of that would create any reason, excuse, motivation or justification for even one man to rape her, much less 18.

Blaming rape on how women dress is an insult to men and a denigration of the rights of women. Blaming a rape on how a little girl dresses, however, is a clear sign of dangerous warped and flawed logic, values, compassion and comprehension.

Ethics Quote of the Week: Ex-Con John Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Charlie made a different kind of mistake, too!

“We’re people, we’re not monsters. We’ve just made a different type of mistake than someone else.”

— 34-year-old John Collins, who announced his support for a provision being pushed forward by the Seattle Office For Human Rights, which believes that convicted criminals should be made a protected class.

Collins sure made a different kind of mistake, all right. He served four years in prison for drugging and raping his estranged wife. Continue reading →

The Wrestler, the Girl, and Cultural Confusion

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

"Wanna wrestle?"

Sixteen-year-old high school sophomore wrestler Joel Northrup forfeited his match against a fourteen-year-old wrestler with two X chromosomes, Cassy Herkelman, at the Iowa state wrestling championships, saying that “As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner.” Obviously Herkelman didn’t require protection from anyone or anything. She was her district’s 112-pound champion wrestler, and she won the Iowa championship for her class as well.  Cassie had won 20 of 33 matches, all against male wrestlers, on her way to the state championship. Maybe Northrup didn’t want to risk being ridiculed for losing to a girl; maybe he was uncomfortable with the sexual overtones of an inter-gender contest. All we can do is assess his conduct by taking him at his word: he believes a young man wrestling a young woman is morally wrong, and was willing to forfeit a match he might have won. Joel was, after all, the fifth-ranked wrestler in the state at 112 pounds, and had a 35-4 record.

Was his decision admirable, or sexist? Was it gentlemanly, or demeaning? Continue reading →

Lara Logan’s Cairo Ordeal Starts An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A female CBS correspondent gets cut off from her security while doing live coverage of the demonstrations in Cairo, is surrounded by a group of Egyptians in the crowd, attacked, and sexually assaulted. She is rescued by Egyptian police and flown back to the U.S., where she is hospitalized.

This what happened to “60 Minutes” Correspondent Lara Logan, and you wouldn’t think such an unambiguous example of brutality and criminal conduct would raise any ethical controversies. But the already nasty incident has metastasized into a full-fledged Ethics Train Wreck, with both the Left and the Right taking turns disgracing themselves.

And the media, of course. Continue reading →

Ethics Perils of an Over-eager Bieber Prompted By An Unethical Interviewer

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

In the current Rolling Stone magazine, teen singing sensation Justin Bieber opines on the morality of the U.S. health care system (Bieber is Canadian) and abortion, saying, among other things…

On abortion: “I really don’t believe in abortion. It’s like killing a baby?”

Abortion in cases of rape: “Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.”

On the U.S. and its current health care system: “You guys are evil. [Rolling Stone notes that he  says this “with a laugh.”] Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

So to sum up: in the course of one interview, Rolling Stone managed to prompt a 16-year-old to… Continue reading →

Ethics Fouls and Julian Assange’s Rape Case

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Well, well, well, Mr Assange!

How does it feel to have your own embarrassing and confidential information leaked to the media and publicized to the world?

On the sound ethical principle that two wrongs doesn’t make a right, The Guardian acquiring and publishing the leaked police report relating to Assange’s rape charges in Sweden is no less unethical because Assange is a smug foe of confidentiality. Nevertheless, it is hard to recall an instance when seeing the tables turned on someone was so satisfying. Ethics foul: Whoever leaked the records, and The Guardian for printing them. But thanks anyway.

It is satisfying for reasons other than delicious irony. Continue reading →

Easy Call: Wikileaks Is Naive, Unethical, and Dangerous

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

All one has to know is the degree to which nuclear war was averted through diplomatic back-channels and secret communications during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 in order to begin to understand how dangerous, stupid and wrong the entire concept of Wikileaks is. The latest dump of secret, near-secret and supposedly secure government messages on a wide range of topics has the  same general effect as a group of small, noisy children running amuck, screaming and banging pots and pans, while adults are trying to address urgent issues of war, commerce, human rights, and terrorism in the same small room. Continue reading →