Ethics Headlines is an
ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg
Feldmeth, a
high school teacher at Polytechnic
School
in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the
past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.
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You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with
links to the original articles. Just email your address
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Ethics
Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others
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would be
interested, please forward the page to them.
This week's headlines--click on the headline to read the full article
- In land of the
Kama Sutra, a clampdown on
romance? On a
crisp winter's afternoon in
this small, unremarkable north Indian town, several couples - some
married, some not - sat together on the benches of a well-groomed
little park named after the country's most famous champion of
nonviolence: Mohandas Gandhi.
Soon came a band of stick-wielding police officers with television news cameras in tow. They yanked the couples by their necks, as though they were so many pesky cats, and slapped them around with their bare hands. The young women shielded their faces with their shawls. The men cowered from the cameras. - California
parents file suit over origins of life course. A group of parents are suing their
small California school district to force it to cancel a four-week high
school elective on intelligent design, creationism and evolution that
it is offering as a philosophy course.
- Public moralizers fail to see how morality applies to them. Back when he was House majority leader -- before he lost that post to indictment in a Texas political scandal -- Tom DeLay was among the chief moralizers of American politics. He was a grand high potentate of the "culture of life" crowd that championed intervening in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo. He vigorously opposed abortion. He could be counted on to whip up a frenzy against gay marriage. Yet DeLay's sense of morality was never troubled by the business practices of one of his "closest and dearest friends," Jack Abramoff, who bilked Indian tribes, set up sham enterprises and bought the votes of powerful congressmen.
- It wasn't simple teasing. To newlywed Brigitte Wright, the off-color barrage from her co-workers was sexual harassment. To Tony Sims, sheriff of Rolette County, N.D., it was just funnin' around. To the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, the slurs were "more serious than simple teasing." Now the Supreme Court has been asked to draw a fine line.
- German cannibal faces murder retrial. The self-confessed cannibal, Armin Meiwes, has gone on trial for murder after his previous eight-and-a half-year sentence for manslaughter failed to satisfy prosecutors. The state convinced the German appeals court that there was a case to answer for murder. The defence is hoping for conviction on the lesser charge of killing on demand.