Westboro Baptist Church

Ethics Quiz: What if the Westboro Baptist Church Is Just Kidding?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I know just how you feel, Homer.

This is a unique Ethics Alarms quiz, because I am offering it while having absolutely no idea what the answer is, or even, perhaps, what the right question should be.

The story you can read here describes the Westboro Baptist Church’s interactions with an openly gay DJ. You will recall that the church’s followers have achieved infamy by loudly protesting on the scene of private funerals for military personnel killed in combat, with “God Hates Gays” being one of their signature protest signs. Yet the DJ, when he visited the group, found them to be friendly, unthreatening, civil and kind. They hugged him. The asked him over for dinner.  The surprised and puzzled writer suggests that the Fred Phelps followers’ act may be a form of First Amendment-testing performance art, sort of like Bill Maher. Maybe they aren’t really hateful after all. Maybe they just act that way!

My Ethics Quiz question for you to consider:

Does the fact that they can be kind, tolerant and accepting in the privacy of their abode make the Westboro Baptist Church protesters less unethical, more unethical, or does it make no difference at all? Continue reading →

An Ethical, Effective, and Ironic Counter-Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Hey, thanks guys! Keep it up!

The OWS protesters could learn a thing or 2, 456 from the clever students at Missouri’s Clayton High School. You see,  protests don’t have to be obnoxious and pointless, if organizers have their wits about them and a clear objective in mind.

After Fred Phelps’ vicious, hateful, and Constitutionally-protected Westboro Baptist Church announced that it planned to take a break from disturbing family funerals for fallen American soldiers who perished for their country in order to demonstrate against Clayton High’s  Gay-Straight Alliance, the student leaders of the Alliance  organized what they call a “Phelps-a-Thon.” Donors are pledging to give money to the Gay-Straight Alliance’s human rights initiatives for every minute the Phelpsians are chanting and waiving their homophobic signs and placards.

Voila! The longer they demonstrate against gays, the more money they raise for gay rights, thus damning themselves to be slowly cut up into little shreds  by sadistic demon high-school cafeteria workers wielding dull vegetable peelers, then reassembled by cubist jokesters, and forced to watch re-runs of RuPaul’s reality show for all eternity, or whatever happens to horrid people like them in Hell.

Peaceful, effective, lucrative, pointed, simple, and funny. You can’t have a more ethical protest than that!

[Thanks to Jeff Hibbert for the tip!]

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Yes, it was Joe Paterno's year, all right.

Welcome to the Third  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the Best and Worst of ethics in 2011!

This is the first installment of the Worst; Part 2 is here. And the Best is here. 

2011 prompted more than 1000 posts, and even then I barely scratched the surface of all the ethical dilemmas and unethical conduct swirling around us. If you have other choices for the various distinctions here and in the subsequent Awards posts, please make them known.

Here are my selections:

Unethical Community of the Year:  Huachuca City, Arizona. Leading the way among American communities that believe, in their hysteria, that former sex offenders who have served their sentences are nonetheless fair game for persecution and the denial of basic rights as citizens and human beings, Huachuca County passed an ordinance that bans registered sex offenders from the use of all public facilities, including parks, school and libraries.  Runner-up: Obion County, Tennessee. Last year, Ethics Alarms gave the county runner-up status as “Unethical Community of the Year” for sending its volunteer fire department to watch a man’s house burn down because he had failed to pay a $75.00 fee. In 2011, it did it again. I swear: if Obion County hasn’t come up with a better system and this happens again in 2012, Obion County will get the title no matter what some other unethical community does.

Most Warped Ethical Values: The Penn State students who protested the firing of football coach Joe Paterno, because, you know, he was such a great football coach that a little thing like allowing a predatory child molester to run amuck on campus shouldn’t be blown all out of proportion. Runner-up: Ron Paul supporters.

Unethical Website of the Year: Lovely-Faces, the anti-Facebook stunt pulled by Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, to show how inadequate Facebook’s privacy controls were. To do it, they stole 250,000 Facebook member profiles and organized them into a new dating site—without the members’ permission. The site embodied “the worst of ethical thinking: taking the identities of others for their own purposes (a Golden Rule breach), using other human beings to advance their own agenda (a Kantian no-no) and asserting that their ends justify abusing 250,000 Facebook users, which is irresponsible utilitarianism.” Continue reading →

A Damning Role Model For Wisconsin’s Public Union Protests

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Fair game for Wisconsin's public unions

The ethical line between Fred Phelps’ anti-gay protesters who disrupt the funerals of  soldiers killed in action, and the self-righteous union protesters opposing Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker’s budget balancing efforts has thinned to the vanishing point.

On Friday, Walker visited the Messmer Catholic Preparatory School in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, to read to third-graders. The third-graders have no political agenda, but 100 protesters felt it was appropriate to disrupt a special day for school children to show their hatred for the governor.
Just as the Westboro Baptist Church feels that its homophobic crusade justifies interfering with military families’ private grief, Wisconsin’s ethically tone-deaf unions feel that innocent student are appropriate collateral damage in their quest to hold on to their privileged status among Wisconsin workers, and elections, laws, deficits and common sense be damned. How especially cynical of the teachers unions, to disrupt the experience of Catholic school students, who, apparently, don’t count. Tell us again, you dedicated teachers, how it’s “all for the children.” Continue reading →

Dancing With Thomas Jefferson: How Assholes Make the Law Spoil Life For Everyone

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Coming to a place of honor and reflection near you.

On Saturday, the U.S. Park Police forcefully arrested five “Code Pink” protesters under the dome of the Jefferson Memorial for defying a recent Federal Appeals Court ruling that dancing at federal monuments was not constitutionally protected expression.

Perhaps you missed that ruling earlier this month, which was, I presume, made necessary by the realization that a flash mob could break out at any moment at the Lincoln Memorial or the Alamo. That was not the threat in 2008, however, when Mary Oberwetter was arrested, also at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, for hoofing to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.

She sued the National Park Service for violating her First Amendment rights, and on May 17 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the Jefferson Memorial should have a “solemn atmosphere” and that dancing, silent or otherwise, was an inappropriate form of expression there. The appellate judges concurred with the lower court that the memorial is “not a public forum,” and thus demonstrators must first obtain a  permit. Demonstrations that require permits in the Park Service’s National Capital region are defined as

“…picketing, speechmaking, marching, holding vigils or religious services and all other like forms of conduct which involve the communication or expression of views or grievances, engaged in by one or more persons, the conduct of which has the effect, intent or propensity to draw a crowd or onlookers. [The] term does not include casual park use by visitors or tourists which does not have an intent or propensity to attract a crowd or onlookers.”

The Appellate Court wrote: Continue reading →

From First Amendment Outrage to Ethics Hypothetical: The Westboro Baptist Church vs. Brandon, Miss. Hoax

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"Never mind!"

Bulletin: The story about how citizens and law enforcement personnel in Brandon, Miss. foiled the efforts of Fred Phelps’ homophobic Westboro Baptist Church to disrupt the funeral of a serviceman killed in Afghanistan never happened. The source of the hoax is unclear, but an enterprising Stars and Stripes blogger investigated and has determined that it never happened. The Church was never even in Brandon.

I detest fake web stories and the people who create them, as you probably know. The public is  confused enough by reality without having falsehoods, fabrications and hoaxes added to its database. Luckily, this is not a news site, but an ethics site, and my commentary about those who applauded this tale of a community conspiring to rob a group of their U.S. Supreme Court confirmed constitutional rights is as valid as when it was widely assumed that the story was real.

The foiling of Fred Phelps’ gang by “Mississippi Burning” tactics is not only an ethics hypothetical that most people flunked, but also an effective trap to lure the self-righteous into agreeing  that ends justify unethical means as long as the victims of those ends are sufficiently despicable.   This group includes one of the most quoted commentators on the story, who approved of the fictional response by the town and wrote,

“This is a template for how to handle the Westboro people. If lawsuits don’t work, other means will. Whatever it takes to keep them from harassing bereaved military families on the day their fallen loved ones are laid to rest.”

He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.

Don’t Cheer Mississippi’s Westboro Baptist Tactics Too Loudly: You Never Know Who Might Hear You

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

"Demonstrators? Just leave them to us."

Sgt. Jason Rogers, who was killed in action in Afghanistan, was buried two weeks ago in Brandon, Mississippi. As is its custom, the Westboro Baptist Church, fresh from U.S. Supreme Court-confirmed constitutional protection, was prepared to sully Sgt. Rogers’ funeral with its usual hateful chants about how God kills our soldiers to punish our sinful, homosexual-loving ways. Its plans were foiled, however, by a little bit of traditional Mississippi social control ingenuity.

A couple of days before the funeral, one of Fred Phelps’ vile cultists boasted about the upcoming protest while visiting a Brandon gas station, and the good citizenry on the scene gave him the sound beating they felt his sentiments warranted. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Who Deserved To Be Fired—Beck or The Duck?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Tough quiz today, ethics fans. Be on your toes!

Our quiz for today: Who most deserved to be fired—Glenn Beck, Gilbert Gottfried (the voice of the Aflac duck),  neither, or both?

The Mad Prophet of Fox, Glenn Beck returned to his radio program with this reflection:

“I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. I’m not not saying that either… but there’s a message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey, you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.”

Yes, Glenn Beck said that the devastation of Japan just may be a message from God. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The U.S. Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

As the perfect tonic for all the attempts to silence Gilbert and Sullivan songs with controversial lyrics, reject bus ads espousing controversial positions, and declare that words like “target” are just too darn inflammatory for the sensitive, politically-correct ears of CNN viewers, here comes the U.S. Supreme Court, galloping to the rescue with a near unanimous (8-1), ringing reaffirmation that free speech is a bastion of American democracy, even when the speaker or speakers are vicious, unfair, cruel, radical and deluded. Continue reading →

The Westboro Baptist Church and Free Speech: When Cruel and Unfair Can Still Be Right

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The United States, as currently constituted, is a utilitarian nation. We embrace the inherent virtue of certain “natural” rights, and tolerate the frequent harm that some citizens commit while exercising the rights that all of us cherish. I think that is the correct philosophy, but it requires us to grit our teeth and re-read the Bill of Rights when the formula produces a nauseating result that is nonetheless right in our democratic culture. It was right to let the Nazis march in Skokie. It was right to let the Klan hold their non-violent, white supremacy demonstrations. And it was right for the court to make Albert Snyder pay the court costs when he lost his lawsuit against a hate group that disrupted his son’s funeral. No, it wasn’t fair, or kind, or empathetic. It was only right. Continue reading →