respect

“It’s Just Sex”? No, It’s Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There isn’t much good that can come out of the sordid infidelity Trifecta of John Edwards, Tiger Woods, and Jesse James, but maybe there will be this: Perhaps after the public has observed and measured all the pain and suffering the outrageous conduct of these three men has inflicted on innocent third parties, especially those who depended on them and trusted them, it will not be so quick to accept the facile argument, perfected during Bill Clinton’s ordeals, that adultery is “just sex.”

The latest flagrant celebrity dog, Jesse James, is an especially powerful case for leaving the Clinton Excuse with Clinton. He had a wife who clearly adored him, the late-marrying Sandra Bullock, who touchingly paid a tribute to her supposedly devoted husband in one of her several Best Actress acceptance speeches this year by saying that she knew he “had her back.” Now tattoo models and strippers are coming out of the woodwork to say they had affairs with the chopper-maker, and the revelations may end up sending his six-year old daughter back to her porn star mother, though James and Bullock had been awarded custody.

Destroy a family, devastate the woman who loves you, uproot your child. But hey, it’s only sex. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I know how the “tea party” people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.”

——Washington Post columnist Courtland Malloy

That’s it, Courtland, just the ticket for helping to cool the inflammatory rhetoric, encourage mutual respect and restore civil discourse. As long as it makes you feel better, go ahead and use your space in the Washington Post to be just as hateful as those whose conduct you deplore. Next step: call anyone a Cro-Magnon racist who takes you to task for it.

Any journalist or columnist who stoops to this kind of irresponsible and emotional name-calling needs to be taken off the job and given a nice, long paid vacation in the Bahamas to get his perspective back. There is too much primal screaming in print already, and it only raises tensions and entrenches both bad feelings and bad conduct. Malloy has been simmering for a long time, so his outburst comes as little surprise. A responsible newspaper, however is foolish to print such a column.

Cool It

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

To listen to the conservative talk radio circuit and read the Right’s wing of the blogosphere, one would think that the United States is in the midst of a coup right out of “Seven Days in May,” or a foreign take-over like the one portrayed in “Red Dawn,” or even an alien infestation by disguised lizards, as in the sci-fi mini-series “V.” Hysteria is everywhere. Dark threats of revolution are not being whispered, but shouted. “I really think civil war is inevitable,” one blogger wrote yesterday.

Holy Gamoly! Continue reading →

Intolerance Plus School Cowardice=Cultural Deprivation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Supreme Court has refused to reconsider a Ninth Circuit decision agreeing that a school could forbid the school band from playing Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria”.

I don’t want to argue about the legal issues (you can read Justice Alito’s dissent here), although I suspect tha the law favors the school’s absurd conduct. But although self-righteous intolerance can effectively bully people and institutions in an atmosphere of school administration cowardice and timidity, it still is wrong, and we all suffer for it. Because one student objected last year to a musical piece at her graduation that mentioned God and angels, the pusillanimous administrators at the school decided to nix an orchestral rendition of “Ave Maria,”  because the title might offend some other intolerant and insufferably self-centered child. Continue reading →

E-mails Aren’t Private? Oh-oh…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in the case of Rehberg v. Paulk that one who sends an e-mail has no “expectation of privacy” in its content, once it is sent to a third party—-and that third party can even be the internet service provider. Which means, in essence, that e-mails aren’t private any more, if this ruling stands.

Here you have a good example of how courts can re-define formal ethical standards on multiple planes with a few words. This means that one of the most influential Federal Courts has given the green light to any government agency or employer who chooses to read your e-mails. It may well be that lawyers who send documents containing confidential client information have breached their duty to protect confidences. It means that if your room-mate reads confidential messages on your laptop without your permission, the law says its your fault, not his.

This is the point where ethics, manners and the Golden Rule becomes more important than ever. The court case may change the law, and it may be legal to read other people’s e-mails without permission, but it’s still not right.

For an excellent scholarly dissent from the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling by Prof. Orrin Kerr, see his argument on the Volokh Conspiracy.

[Many thanks to Prof. Monroe Freedman whose post at the Legal Ethics Forum alerted me to both the case and Prof. Kerr’s critique.]

Why Professional Reviewers Are Unethical, and Why We’ll Be Better Off Without Them

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When Variety recently announced that it was firing its in-house film and drama critics, there was much tut-tutting and garment-rending over the impending demise of professional reviewing in magazines, newspapers and TV stations. The villain, the renders cry, lies, as in The Case of the Slowly Dying Newspapers, with the web, which allows any pajama-clad viewer of bootleg videos to write film reviews, and any blogger who cares about theater to write a review of a play. “I think it’s unfortunate that qualified reviewers are being replaced,” said one movie industry pundit, “but that’s what’s happening.”

I say, “Good. It’s about time.” (And also: “QUALIFIED?”) If there has ever been an excessively influential non-professional profession that caused as much damage as reviewing, I’m not sure I want to know about it. The end of full-time film and drama critics as we know them can only prove to be a boon for artists and audiences alike. Continue reading →

Nomar, Beantown, and the Legacy Obligation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Organizations have histories, and that means they have debts to pay. Time moves on, and personnel changes, but the organization that neglects the human beings who played major roles in defining their image, goals, achievements and success has breached its integrity, and violated its Legacy Obligation.

For nearly eight seasons, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra was the face, heart, and soul of the Boston Red Sox. A spidery gymnast in the field who completed the Holy Trinity of Hall of Fame-bound shortstops—Jeter, A-Rod and “Nomah” —who lit up the American League in the mid-Nineties, Garciaparra was a home-grown fan idol. He did everything wonderfully and with panache; Ted Williams, the city’s reigning baseball god, pronounced him his official successor.

Then, suddenly, it all unraveled. Continue reading →

Spam Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was not previously familiar with the extent of that scourge of all blogs, spam. Nor did I realize that deciding which comments qualified for instant deletion would involve an ethical balancing act, but it does, and I am getting the hang of it.

WordPress, thankfully, gives its blogs a program that flags the most obvious spam, fake, automatically generated comments that have nothing to do with the post they are attached to, entered only to get publicity for websites that are selling something. Sending out this junk is pretty sleazy: it aims to junk up a serious website with dishonest drivel and use it as an unwilling billboard, usually for less-than-admirable products and services. The worst ones try to waste my time as well, falsely “alerting me” that my blog doesn’t work with their browser or that my RSS feed is malfunctioning. This kind of spam never gets through the door. 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 →

Ethics Dunce: Itawamba County, Miss. School Board; Ethics Hero: Constance McMillan

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It will be interesting, as well as depressing, to see how many innocent bystanders are injured as various institutions and organizations emulate Washington D.C.’s Catholic Charities’ “solution” to its objection to  gay Americans having legally enforced rights to do what anyone else can. That organization’s draconian solution was that if a benefit can’t be withheld from gays, then the benefit isn’t worth giving. Thus, because it believed that providing health benefits to the now legally recognized same-sex spouses of gay employees would imply endorsement of conduct it considers sinful, the charity eliminated spousal benefits for all new employees, harming the innocent to show contempt for…well, the innocent.

Who could pass up logic and justice like that? Not the Itawamba County, Miss. school board! Continue reading →