Utah

Ethics Quiz: The Charlie Kirk Statue

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

(See? I spelled “Charlie” right this time!)

Utah Valley University is where conservative activist Charley Kirk was murdered. Reasonably, the school has proposed erecting a statue in honor of Kirk, who was widely admired for his character and legacy, the student group Turning Point USA, a spearhead of the conservative and MAGA movements.

The proposal has sparked furious controversy on the campus, however. UVU Students for a Democratic Society, a progressive group, argues that Kirk is not worthy of such an honor, that students oppose a statue that will make them feel “unsafe” (as in “represents viewpoints that they disagree with.” I know, I know…) and that they don’t want “outsiders” coming on the campus to gawk at a statue.

“We’re out here because we want to protest any sort of Charlie Kirk memorial,” a student protester told reporters at a recent rally. “We don’t want his likeness on campus; we don’t want his likeness sort of immortalized.” Signs at the group’s rally had legends like “No Kirk on Campus” and “Memorial For Unity Not Hate.”

There are dueling petitions pushing for and against a statue to Kirk, with the opposition threatening to tear down a Kirk memorial if one appears. Considering how the Mad Left went on a statue-toppling rampage not long ago, this does not seem like an idle threat—or, if you like, an idol threat.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it respectful and responsible for a school to erect a statue that inspires such strong divisions on campus?

I regard this as a tough ethics call. Even if the protesters represent a vocal minority, even if their hatred for Kirk is based on misunderstandings or extremism, even if not erecting a Kirk statue will constitute a successful heckler’s veto, I question whether insisting on a statue (that is certain to be defaced, vandalized or destroyed) of a political figure in the current polarized environment on campuses and elsewhere is simply fanning flames that need to be extinguished.

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Pointer: College Fix

Of Signs, Flags and Art…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Two controversies raise issues of ethical line-drawing in state and local laws.

1. Sign or Art? Leavitt’s Country Bakery in Conway, a community of more than 10,000 people in New Hampshire, erected a colorful mural over the store in 2022. It was the creation of local high school art students showing sunbeams shining down on a mountain range made of sprinkle-covered chocolate and strawberry doughnuts, a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and other pastries. The muralwas popular with everyone but the local zoning board, which ruled that the painting was not art but advertising. This meant it was a sign, and at about 90 square feet, four times bigger than the local sign ordinance allows. Lawyers for Conway insist that “restricting the size of signs serves the significant government interest of preserving the town’s aesthetics, promoting safety, and ensuring equal enforcement.” The store’s owner sued the town in federal court in 2023, saying his freedom of speech rights were being violated. He’s seeking a symbolic single dollar in damages.

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Civic Debate Ethics Tip: Don’t Use Words As Accusations If You Don’t Know What They Mean [Missing Link Restored!]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s the newly designed Utah state flag flying above this post. A bill signed into law in March adopted it to replace the 1911 version that has been the standard for over a century. It looked like this:

Now I’ve been involved in the equivalent of flag redesign controversies several times: logo changes. It is always a mess. No matter how stodgy or outdated the current logo was, people were used to it, and hated the idea of a new one. No matter how innovative or well-designed the potential replacement was, board members would subjectively conclude it was ugly. Inevitably someone with no artistic skill or background would whip out a pad and doodle his or her idea of a good logo.

However, the issue at hand is the term being used in ultra-conservative Utah to turn the public against the new flag. It is being accused of being “woke.”

“Woke”? The flag includes at its center a beehive, just like the old flag, honoring the pioneers who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. Gov. Spencer Cox had declared that the beehive had to be prominent on any re-imagined flag, and promised to veto any design without it.

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A Hanlon’s Razor Conundrum: The Case Of The Missing Cheerleader

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

cheerleader left out

This one made me want to cry.

Fourteen-year-old Morgyn Arnold grew up in Layton, Utah cheering for her six older siblings at sporting events, and worked hard to become an official cheerleader, like her father and sister before her.

Morgyn has Down syndrome, so being on the Shoreline Junior High School cheerleading squad as the team manager means more to her than being part of a cheer team does to most cheerleaders, giving her pride and a sense of achievement while providing the opportunity to make new friends. She also learned all of the dance moves so she could cheer in front of the home team crowd.

It is understandable, then, that she was, according to her family, heartbroken when the school’s yearbook came out a few weeks ago and Morgyn was not in the team picture or listed as part of the squad. What isn’t understandable is how this could happen. The school apologized and claimed it was a “mistake.” Morgyn’s sister Jordan Poole believes the cruel snub was intentional.

So do I.

Two pictures were taken, one including Morgyn, on the left, and the other excluding her. Why would there be two pictures, unless someone thought that they might choose to use the photo with only the conventionally pretty girls in it? Team mate Maddie Campbell, 15, said she did not remember whether the photographer or the team’s adviser asked Morgyn to sit out of some of the team’s photos, and does not recall hearing any explanation for the action. She says she thought it was a weird request at the time.

Well, now she knows why they did it. Sure enough, the photo without Morgyn was used in yearbooks and school social media accounts.

Hence the Hanlon’s Razor controversy. Hanlon’s Razor states that one should never assume malice when stupidity can explain conduct. But who is that stupid? And who could be that malicious?

Davis School District community relations supervisor Shauna Lund told The New York Times that the incident was “under investigation” and the school planned to work with the family to “make sure this doesn’t happen again.” Oh, I think it’s fair to say that they won’t leave out Morgyn’s photo again. THAT would really be stupid.

Then Lund mouthed the mandatory wokisms. “We also want to apologize to those who were impacted outside of that family who feel that something was done to not be inclusive. We want the student to feel like she is included in the community. We want to apologize for that mistake,” said Lund. The family doesn’t “feel” something was done: their daughter was excluded from the yearbook, which is not “inclusive” by definition.

Morgyn’s father, Jeff Arnold, is almost as bad as Lund. He said that instead of placing the blame on the school, he wanted to use the situation to raise awareness of the importance of “thoughtful inclusion and compassion.” “If we can find ways so that doesn’t happen to anyone else, that’s just what we want,” Mr Arnold said. “That’s all that matters, because we can’t go back and put it in the yearbook.”

No, but you can sue the school for negligent infliction of emotional distress. You know how to ensure this doesn’t happen to anyone else? Make it hurt. Don’t let these administrators get off with cheap pieties. Make it hurt enough that the little monsters who conspired to shun the Down Symdrome girl are made to regret their cruelty, and that the sleepy faculty advisor who let this happen under his or her watch is soon searching the online want ads

Poll says her sister has already forgiven everyone involved. Of course she has. Down Syndrome kids are usually instinctively kind and generous. One of their differences is that they seem to be imbued with a natural sweetness, and intrinsic ethical instincts. So, naturally, her school mates decided to rip her heart out.

Shoreline Junior High is fortunate that I am not Morgyn’s father, and if my wife Grace were her mother, the staff would have to hide out in Monument Valley. Trust me.

Post Script: Our professional journalists at work: In four sources, I found Morgyn’s name spelled Morgyn, Morgan, and Morgin, with multiple spellings appearing in the one article.

Ex-Salt Lake County GOP Chairman Scott Miller For Governor Of NY!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Scott Miller

I jest.

Sort of.

Salt Lake County GOP Chairman Scott Miller has resigned his post after brushing off complaints from women in his party regarding Salt Lake County Republican Party communications director Dave Robinson’s pattern of harassment, body-shaming and more.

Miller, who was running for the state Republican chair, had trivialized the allegations as petty squabbling. It was pretty obviously more than that. For example, after Salt Lake County Council candidate Laurie Stringham created a campaign video for donors in which she said, “Support Laurie Stringham for Salt Lake County Council, so when Mayor [Jenny] Wilson says ‘more, more, more,’ we can say ‘no, no, no!’,” she said that Robinson called her to complain about the spot.

“You sound like you’re having an orgasm!” Robinson shouted at her over her car’s speakerphone. He then repeated her “more, more, more” catchphrase with obscene grunting sounds., and told her that if she wanted to “whore herself out, that was her choice.” Then, Stringham said, Robinson shouted, “I will make sure you never get elected! I will ruin you! And I will make sure the party never works with you! Get your shit together!’” and hung up.

Robinson, who is openly gay, was accused of similar abuse by several women, who said he referred to them in demeaning, derogatory and sexual terms, attempted to bully them, and even withheld important campaign resources unless they wrote opinion pieces about his favorite issues. Yet the party chair, Miller, refused to investigate or take their concerns seriously. To the contrary, he attacked Robinson’s critics on the county party’s official email last week, naming all of the women coming forward and questioning their motives.

“Are these persons and possibly their special interest backers attempting to embarrass and cancel me and our volunteers?” Miller asked in part. “I will not be CANCELLED.” Hilariously, after these remarks received condemnation from everyone (including Utah’s Republican governor) but Robinson, Miller performed a spectacular if unconvincing flip-flop, and tweeted,

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Mid-Day Ethics Madness, 8/19/2020: Susan B., Fauxahontas, Utah…And “Gordie”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

When I was looking through the 2012 posts yesterday, ultimately stumbling upon the long discourse about Barack Obama’s disastrous Presidency, I was struck by how, even in an election year, so many non-political ethics issues were discussed here. This is something that was already driving me crazy about 2020. Thanks to the pandemic, there is virtually no popular culture news. Legal ethics news is drastically reduced, as are reports from other sectors of society and culture. In this warped environment, politics spreads like kudzu, or killer bees, or snakeheads—you can choose your favorite invasive species or opportunistic organism analogy. I’m trying, I swear, but my over-all impression looking back on 2012 is that writing, and I presume reading, an ethics commentary blog was a lot more fun.

I’m sorry.

1. Today’s rejected Ethics Alarms comment comes from “Gordie,” was opining on the post on Ellen De Generis’s late hit accuser. He wrote,

Ellen was an a$$ to this boy and shes paying for it now. All you lip huggers need to wake TFU and rejoice when you hear truth no matter how unsavory or unpalatable you find it. Be a bully, get bullied. Dont you all see that Karma train pullin up? And with enough hands to slap every butt as it goes on by toot toot

Observations:

  • Welcome to my world. This is why so few new voices are added to the commentariat here.
  • Does anyone know what a “lip-hugger” is?
  • Tells in the comment that let us know the writer can’t tell an ethics from fuzzy slipper: mentioning “karma,” and the statement, “Be a bully, get bullied.”

2. Here is some non-political legal ethics news, and it’s important, if technical.

Before this week, only the District of Columbia, where I am licensed, allows non-lawyers to be partners in law firms. The majority position in the profession is that non-lawyers inevitably have a different alignment of values from the legally trained, and thus are not likely to be as sensitive to duties to clients, like confidentiality, and conflicts of interest. Pure “investors” are also banned from buying a share of law firm profits, because they are deemed likely to be governed by financial needs and motives rather than the best interests of clients.

When the D.C. bar decided to break the mold decades ago, everyone assumed that other jurisdictions would follow its lead, and soon doctors, engineers, scholars and accountants, among others, would be joining firms and allowing them to add new services. (Europe and Australia already allow  such “multidisciplinary firms.”) It didn’t happen.

Now, however, the dominoes might be starting to fall.  From the ABA Journal: Continue reading →

The Banjo/Damien Patton Affair: Can You Ever Escape A Disgraceful Past? Should You Be Able To?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Damien Patton is the the 47-year-old co-founder and CEO of the rising data gathering startup Banjo. The combination of the company’s success and its founders’ inspiring life story has made him the subject of many tech media and business publication profiles, for it is the kind of gutter to boardroom story on individual bootstrapping America has always celebrated.  He has described an abusive childhood that caused him to run away from home at age 15. He joined the U.S. Navy, then worked as a NASCAR mechanic before learning the craft of crime-scene investigation.  He  learned to code, and then became a co-founder of Banjo as he raised  nearly $223 million in venture capital for the Utah-based company.

However, Americans don’t like their rags-to-riches stories to begin too deep in the gutter. The tech news outlet OneZero uncovered transcripts of courtroom testimony, sworn statements, and more than 1,000 pages of federal records revealing that before he turned to coding, Patton was a member of the Dixie Knights, a Ku Klux Klan group active in the Nashville area in the late 1980s and early 1990s,  and not a passive one. He was was involved in shooting up a synagogue, for example. Understandably, this detail was something Patton did not highlight in his inspirational speeches before aspiring entrepreneurs.

The question is, now what? What does this mean today? What should it mean? Continue reading →

Hurry-Up Saturday Ethics Round Up, 2/29/2020: “Happy Birthday Frederick!” Edition [Corrected And Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

 

Yes, it’s Frederick’s 41st birthday.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should. Frederick is the overly duty-conscious and somewhat dim-witted hero of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” one of the Savoy duo’s so called “Big Three,” the Victorian operettas that have been performed the most over the years. (The other two are “H.M.S Pinafore,” and the currently unfairly besieged—but arguably the best of them all—“The Mikado.”) They aren’t my three favorites, mind you, but like seven of the other G&S masterpieces, they are damned good, and have aged better than most American musicals, especially the Rogers and Hammerstein classics. Poor Frederick was apprenticed to a pirate until his 21st birthday, but due to a cruel twist of fate and legalistic nit-picking, his 21st birthday didn’t arrive until 1940, because he was born on leap year. Today is his 41st birthday, though he is 164 years old.

I apologize for the stupid subtitles in the clip from the movie. Unlike most G&S performers, the diction of Kevin Klein, Rex Smith and Angela Lansbury is excellent.

(I’m hurrying because I’ve learned from cruel experience that traffic on Saturday after 12:30 slows to crawl..)

1. Thus ends Black History Month. I do not favor tribal distinctions in our days and months. It is inherently divisive, and Black History Month smacks of honors affirmative action. The history of black Americans is American history, inextricably intertwined with the history of the rest of us. Our entire history ought to be taught and learned without bias and spin, and no race or ethnic groups should hesitate to take pride in the accomplishments of other Americans regardless of their color or ancestry.

NOTICE of CORRECTION! Item #2 below has now been shown to have been based on a hoax. More after…

2. Res ipsa loquitur:

Obviously the  note in Chuck’s tickler file came up: “Today transition from saying Trump was doing too much in response to the Corona virus to saying that he isn’t doing enough.”

What awful, awful hacks these people are.

They are still awful hacks, but I hate being caught by these hoaxes. This one was especially sinister, because the fake tweet is completely consistent with what the Democrats and the news media had been saying about the President’s move to stop travel from China. However, insisting that a faked message is still “true enough” is what Dan Rather did in the scandal that ended his career as a respectable journalist.

We now know that the tweet is a hoax because ProPoblica, a nonprofit journalism organization, maintains a database of tweets deleted by politicians called Politwoops that uses Twitter’s Streaming API to find tweets from politicians that have been deleted.  Schumer’s tweet  is  NOT in the database, thus we know it wasn’t posted.

I apologize for being caught this way, AGAIN.

3.  The rest of the story: Remember Tilli Buchanan, the Utah stepmother who paraded around the house topless in front of the kids? She was arrested and charged under Utah law with three misdemeanor counts of lewdness involving a child. Iwrote that this should be an ethics question, not a legal one:

[T]here are the Tilli Buchanans among us, who want to tear down social norms, not really knowing what the consequences will be over the long term, just for the hell of it. In addition to being irresponsible and disrespectful, they are also lousy citizens.

They are not, however, criminals. She should be able to walk around naked in front of her children, just as we allow parents to engage in all sorts of other dubious practices. That she can doesn’t mean she should, but this is part of a long, long list where we must rely on ethics rather than law.

Facing  being placed on a sex offender registry for 10 years,  Tilli agreed to a plea deal with her pleading guilty one class B misdemeanor lewdness charge and paying a $600 fine while serving probation. The charge will be dismissed if Buchanan can keep her shirt on for a year.

4. More “The rest of the story,” uber-jerk division. In 2018, Saturday Night Live performer Pete Davidson mocked GOP Congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw for his eyepatch, the result of a combat wound. Davidson said that he looked like “a hitman in a porno film” and dismissed the origin of his disfiguring injury as something he got in “war or whatever.” Veterans, their families and others who don’t usually pay attention to SNL anymore since it has become partisan, shrill, and lazy protested loudly, and Davidson apologized while Crenshaw appeared on a later show, where he was funny, gracious, and forgiving

It was obvious to me (and, I’m sure, Crenshaw) that Davidson was forced to apologize, but it takes a special breed of jerk to come back after he has left the scene of his insults and say so.

In Davidson’s new stand-up special, “Alive from New York,” Davidson, says,

“So I made fun of this guy with an eyepatch and then, like, I kind of got forced to apologize. My roommate thought I should apologize so that I didn’t get shot in the face. People were like, ‘You hate America!’ And I’m like, ‘No, I just didn’t want to be incorrect about how he lost his fucking eye. Is that a crime?! The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of — and I apologize for — is I did make that guy famous and a household name for no reason, right? I did what, like, Ariana Grande did for me, right? I sucked his dick at ‘SNL.'”

This is what you lost your eye for, Dan.

5. You could show this to your Bernie Bros friends, but I doubt they could understand it.  At the Foundation for Economic Education, J. Kyle de Vries does an excellent job of explaining the Social Security cheat, and why it has to be reformed. The system no longer makes sense, but the socialist enablers refuse to consider the problem. de Vries writes in part,

Millennials and Generation Z: Do you want to fund my Social Security benefits with higher payroll taxes than I paid in the past? Especially when the likelihood is high that your benefits are not going to be as lucrative as mine?

I am lucky. My Social Security benefits will be funded by you and other workers, and I plan on living to 140. If you are younger, that should concern you. Right now, you and your employer are forced to contribute 12.4 percent of your income into a fund that goes into a black hole, financing some other guy’s retirement. Wouldn’t you rather put that 12.4 percent into a fund you manage?

…Assume a self-employed 25-year-old makes $75,000 this year. Further assume she is required to set aside 12.4 percent of her income into a protected, tax-deferred trust, just as she must do for Social Security. But this is her account, managed by her, just like a 401k plan. If she realizes a 3 percent increase in income each year and can earn 6 percent on a conservative mix of stocks and bonds during her lifetime, her trust will accumulate to over $3,500,000 at age 70. At 8 percent growth, that number will be an astounding $6,142,000.

Would you rather have accumulated these much larger sums to augment your retirement income than get the average $1,500 per month Social Security check issued today? Lesser potential income is just one of the problems with the present system.

…Contrary to popular belief, payroll taxes are not invested in a fund to secure benefits like most other pension plans. Since the beginning, payroll taxes went first to make payments to current retirees with the balance “borrowed” by the feds for spending on things other than Social Security benefits. For most of the program’s history, the amount of payroll taxes the feds received was much higher than the Social Security payments, meaning the feds had a lot of money to spend on other things. Because of demographics, that situation has changed perilously, threatening the future of the Social Security system.

…What all this means is millennials and Gen Zers will see higher taxes for Social Security across the board, perhaps many times. They will also most likely see reductions in promised benefits, especially if they accumulate a lot of money over their working lifetimes.

…Wouldn’t you rather have your own retirement fund you manage yourself instead of the flimsy promise of government IOUs? Increasing payroll taxes today only delays the day of reckoning. The current unfunded liabilities for Social Security are over $34 trillion. Let’s not double down on a failed experiment that will bankrupt our country in the future and leave millions destitute in retirement.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Donald Trump was articulate enough and organized enough to explain this in a debate, or in a national address to the public? Wouldn’t it be nice if young voters would pay attention, and if the news media could report on the issue fairly?

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could fly to Disney World by flapping my arms really hard?

Ethics Quiz: The Sixth Grade Dance

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

A furious mother is making an issue out of a Utah middle school’s policy requiring sixth-graders to agree acquiesce when a classmate asks them to dance.

Alicia Hobson’s 11-year-old daughter, Azlyn was asked to dance by a boy she thought was icky. She “politely” refused, but the principle at Rich Middle School in Laketown, Utah,  intervened, telling the couple to get out onto the dance floor. Was the boy short, fat, covered with acne, bad-smelling, a bully, afflicted with Down Syndrome? Was he poor, have a lisp, or Muslim? Was there a cool boy Azlyn was waiting to play Prince Charming? Never mind: As the principal, Kip Motta, later explained in a letter to Alicia Hobson, the school has a policy requiring students to accept dance invitations, and sticks by it. Motta wrote,

“We do ask all students to dance. It is the nice thing to do and this will continue to be our policy. There have been similar situations in the past where some students have felt uncomfortable with others, and, as stated prior, the issues were discreetly handled. This allowed all students to feel welcome, comfortable, safe, and included.”

Hobson equates the policy with “rape culture,” and is prepared to take the issue to the Utah Board of Education. “Girls HAVE to learn that they have the right to say no and that those around them have to respect that,” Hobson wrote on Facebook. “I’m not going to quietly stand by while my daughter and all of her classmates are being wrapped up in rape culture. No way.”

Ethics Alarms dealt with a similar issue in a different context in this post, about children accepting kisses and hugs from repulsive family members.

Before I pop the quiz question, I have three observations. The first is that that the principal’s fad use of the word “safe” has just got to stop. That’s not what “safe” means, and if we keep using “safe” to mean “insulated from any event, feeling or experience that someone might prefer to avoid,” the word will cease to have any communication value. The second is that equating the social obligation to accept an invitation at a supervised dance with “rape culture” is a hyperbolic crock, and should be identified as such immediately.

The third observation is that the “Today” headline is intentionally misleading and unfairly supports the mother’s inflammatory framing. “School policy forbids kids from saying ‘no’ when asked to dance” presumes the conclusion Hobson wants. “School policy requires students to be kind and considerate when asked to dance” promotes  the school’s rationale. An ethical and responsible headline would be, ““School policy requires students to accept an invitation to dance.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz today :

Is the school’s policy wise and ethical?

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Ethics Quiz: The Upsetting License Plate

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Utah Division of Motor Vehicles lists standards for vanity plates, based on a statute that “forbids any combination of letters or numbers that ‘may carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency or that would be misleading.’”

Plate letter and number combinations that reference drugs, that are “sexual, vulgar, or derogatory,” that  suggest ideas “dangerous to public welfare” or disrespect “race, religion, deity, ethnic heritage, gender, or political affiliation,” are not permitted.

Thus it was that Utah high school English teacher Matt Pacenza, driving home, spied  a vanity plate reading “DEPORTM.” As a concerned citizen, he snapped a photo of the personalized plate and posted it to Twitter. (Note: I’m more concerned about drivers taking photos while operating their motor vehicles than about what their plates say, but I’m weird, or so I’m told). The resulting cocial media comments attracted the attention of some state senators as well as the Utah State Tax Commission, which oversees license plate approval. Now the commission says it is reviewing whether the plate violates department guidelines.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the weekend is…

Is there anything wrong with having that license plate on your car?

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