respect

Role Model Ethics: A Spring Training Drama in One Act

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Kevin Youkilis, role model

From Fort Myers, Florida, where the Boston Red Sox are in the early stages of  Spring Training, Boston Globe sportswriter Pete Abraham reports the following scene involving Kevin Youkilis, the Boston third baseman:

The Red Sox infielders were taking grounders on Field 2 this morning when a kid who looked to be 10 or 11 yelled out, “Hey, Youk, give me a ball!”

Kevin Youkilis looked up and said, “What’s the right way to ask?” Chagrined, the kid said, “Can I please have a ball?”

Youk tossed the kid a ball. “Don’t ever forget that for the rest of your life,” he said.

“Thanks,” said the kid.

It may not take a village to raise a child, but the village can certainly help out, especially those who children admire, look up to and respect. Kevin Youkilis took the time to teach a boy he had never seen before a crucial lesson about politeness, civility and respect, and because the lesson  came from a baseball player, the boy really might remember it for the rest of his life. This was a gift. It only took a few seconds, but it might make a huge difference over time as the boy grows to manhood, and all because a professional athlete accepted the responsibility of being a role model.

Nice job, Youk.

Now try to stay healthy this year.

Academy Awards Curtain Call Ethics: The Unkindest Snub of All

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Every year the Academy Awards manages to neglect a distinguished actor or actress who has died since the previous Oscars ceremony, and usually it is inexplicable. Two years ago, it was Farrah Fawcett who was snubbed. This year  Oscar was more callous and negligent than ever before, robbing at least eight deserving performers of their final curtain calls, and there is  just no excuse for it. As usual, Oscar flacks will claim that time was limited, but that won’t fly: why was there time to include, for example, Whitney Houston, who not only had minimal film credentials but who also  had an entire awards show dedicated to her just a week ago? Whitney hardly rated a gratuitous nod from Oscar, especially while it was snubbing so many real actors.

I will be generous and apply Hanlon’s Razor, but with reluctance: it seems to me that there were too many blatant omissions and too many obscure insiders included for it all to be accidental. Did the behind-the-scenes members of the Academy stage a coup, and demand that their fallen colleagues get their names displayed this year to millions of Americans who almost certainly never heard of them? If so, that still couldn’t justify the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences showing such apathy and disrespect for deceased actors that audiences do remember, or if not, should be reminded of one last time.

Here are the actors who Oscar neglected to help us remember, appreciate, and thank: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: The Washington Post Editors

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“In their anti-abortion fervor, they thought that requiring ultrasounds, even transvaginal ones, was justified if it would change the minds of some women who’d considered ending their pregnancies”

—The Washington Post, in an editorial condemning the efforts of Virginia’s Republicans to pass a measure requiring an ultrasound scan of the fetus before a woman could get an abortion. The bill, which had been poised for passage, evaporated after it was revealed that women in the earliest stages of pregnancy would be required to suffer an invasive procedure, and Republican Governor Bob McDonnell announced that he would not sign it in its current form.

Seldom has an editorial managed to be so frighteningly dismissive of human life while being entirely correct on the issue it was discussing. Continue reading →

Albert Pujols, Stan the Man, and the Shameless Jeremy Lin Censors

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

THIS is "El Hombre." Stan's Polish, by the way. Do you care? Does the Asian American Journalists Association?

If you don’t know who Albert Pujols is, you should: he’s probably the best hitter in baseball, a slugging first baseman whose career so far has already guaranteed him a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Over the winter he left his original team and the city that worshiped him, St. Louis and its Cardinals, because, though the team he professed to “owe everything” offered him a deal that would guarantee that his great-grand children could be beach bums all their lives, a team in Southern California, the Angels, offered him even more, so he can light his cigars with C-notes and pave his driveway with gold.. I think elevating money over every other value to that extent is an unethical and culturally corrupting choice, and said so at the time.

Now Albert has re-endeared himself to me  by publicly objecting to the Angels’ pre-season promotional campaign calling him “El Hombre.” “What?” you say. “I thought you have been condemning political correctness in the discussion of athletes with ethnic identities! Don’t you think it’s ridiculous for Pujols, who is of Hispanic descent, to object to a nickname that plays on his heritage?” Indeed I have been condemning such political correctness and over-sentivity, and still do. But that isn’t why Albert is objecting.

Back in St. Louis, you see, they also tried to call Pujols “El Hombre,” in a deliberate evocation of the city’s most famous and celebrated slugger, the great Stan “The Man” Musial, one of the best and most admirable players in baseball history. Pujols put a stop to it. There was only one player in the city who could carry the title “The Man”, he said, and that was Musial, who is alive and in his 90’s. Just saying “the Man” in a different language didn’t change the fact that the honor was Musial’s, and shouldn’t be taken  away. Stan Musial was and is “the Man;” Pujols respected that, and defended it Continue reading →

Ethics Bob: You Were Right; the Kansas Republicans Are Dunces

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, Bob, you were right again and I was wrong; you don't have to be so damn happy about it.

When I wrote about Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal, who disgracefully circulated Psalm 109 to all Republican House members that he said was a perfect prayer for Obama—a Psalm that calls for the death of a despot—my colleague Bob “Ethics Bob” Stone disputed my prediction that his GOP party leaders would force him to step down.

Bob was right; I was naive. A national petition is circulating to demand O’Neal’s ouster, but it is being pushed by Democrats, which conveniently gives Republicans, and O’Neal, the chance to argue that the effort is “partisan.”

It isn’t partisan. It’s necessary, rational and reasonable. The fact that Republicans don’t have the integrity to take the lead in purging their ranks of this irresponsible, uncivil and vile official–that’s partisan.

Bob wins. I ignored a key rule that controls in such situations: Never overestimate a political party’s capacity for courage, decency, or common sense.

Especially Republicans.

Ethics Dunce and All-Time Most Unethical Group With “Ethics” In Its Name: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I'm SO glad my boyfriend joined PETA!

The People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals seems to be unable to grasp the simple concept that if you show yourself to be completely insensitive to matters of right and wrong involving human beings, nobody in their right mind is going care what you think constitutes the ethical treatment of animals. The latest in a long trail of proof: before the disturbing controversy over the pro-Chris Brown tweets had cooled and in the wake of the death Whitney Houston, a former of domestic abuse victim. PETA thought it was the perfect time to release a new ad celebrating the desirability of being able to harm women in the bedroom.

The 30 second spot shows a young woman without pants and wearing a neck brace as she painfully walks to her apartment. “This is Jessica,” narrator says. “She suffers from ‘BWVAKTBOOM,’ ‘Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom Out of Me,’ a painful condition that occurs when boyfriends go vegan and can suddenly bring it like a tantric porn star.” Jessica reaches the apartment and smilingly get ready for another round of presumably rough sex.

There are many terms that accurately describe men who are so uninterested in the women they have intimate relations with that they cause them pain and take pride in it. Rapists. Abusers. Max Cady. Sadists. Misogynists. Ass-holes.

“Vegans” is not one of them.

“PETA members,” perhaps.

 

America Is Severely Confused About Domestic Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments

John Wayne paddling his wife (Maureen O'Hara) in "McClintock!" I love ya, Duke, but this isn't funny any more....if it ever was.

Violence inflicted by one partner in a relationship upon another is absolutely unethical, yet it is one of those embedded cultural habits from the bad old days that still flourishes. Over at the Whitney Houston post, where I am being over-run by the drug-legalization zealots, sicced on me by a sad website where people indulge their dreams of legally de-braining themselves on a regular basis, there is widespread contempt for the concept  that cultural norms of what is right, wrong and worthy of shame controls our worst impulses. That contempt is as crippling as it is ignorant, for controlling behavior is what cultures do, and why they are essential. And our culture is still giving confusing signals about domestic abuse. Two recent examples: Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Make Presidents’ Day Super”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The degradation of America’s values continues in seductive and incremental ways.

Take the online petition “Make Presidents’ Day Super,” described as…

“A plan to move Presidents’ Day to the Monday after the Super Bowl. For football. For hangovers. For America.”

The proposal is unethical in many ways, beginning with its dishonest presentation.  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect holiday, seek to take what should be one of our most patriotic holidays and actually give it more meaning, make it more American,” the argument begins. Make it “more American”? How, exactly, does moving a holiday that already minimizes the national recognition of the birthday of George Washington by making it a floating annual date to manufacture a three-day weekend make that holiday “more American”? Continue reading →

Let’s Be Clear: Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal Is A Disgrace, And He Must Resign

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

We're praying for you, Mike---to get the Hell out.

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal is refusing to resign his post in the wake of an uproar of his own making. In December, the legislator sent an email to his fellow Republicans asking them to pray Psalm 109,  an unusual and mean-spirited psalm that calls for the death of a leader. The Psalm says, in lines 7-12:

When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin.
    Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
    Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
    Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
    Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
    Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.’ Continue reading →

The Runway and The Snowy Owl: An Ethics Conflict Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

“One showed up at the airport in Hawaii, and they shot it,” Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Montana, told the New York Times.“It’s the first ever in Hawaii and they shot it!” Holt was expressing his dismay at the sad news that a snowy owl, one of the most magnificent of all American birds, had journeyed from its Arctic home all the way to Hawaii and been shot dead for its effort. He was quoted in a Times story about the sudden, mysterious surge in snowy owl sightings all over the country, giving people a chance to see the huge, white predators in places where they had never appeared before. Like Hawaii.

“Aloha!”

Bang!

Here is a lesson in the value of waiting to get the full story before making assumptions. I saw the Times story, and had sketched out a post on the doomed Hawaii visitor, something about mankind’s unethical impulse to destroy beautiful living things to make beautiful dead things like fur coats, trophies and stuffed snowy owls. But my travel travails made it impossible for me to finish it, and it’s a good thing. Honolulu Civil Beat had the rest of the story. Continue reading →