Ethics Headlines
#64            

Volume 2, Number 12
                            Friday, March 24, 2006


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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This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • Pandora and polygamy. Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle. As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights.
  • 'Teach to the test'? What test? Colman McCarthy writes: I have never given a test. I respect my students too much to demean them with exercises in fake knowledge.Tests represent fear-based learning, the opposite of learning based on desire. Frightened and fretting with pre-test jitters, students stuff their minds with information they disgorge on exam sheets and sweat out the results. I know of no meaningful evidence that acing tests has anything to do with students' character development or whether their natural instincts for idealism or altruism are nurtured.
  • Unwed fathers fight for babies placed for adoption by mothers. Although one in every three American babies has unwed parents, birth fathers' rights remain an unsettled area, a delicate balancing act between the importance of biological ties and the undisrupted placement of babies whose mothers relinquish them for adoption.
  • Afghan man prosecuted for converting. An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday.
  • A moral battleground, a civil discourse. In school districts across the nation, escalating conflicts involving sexual orientation in the curriculum, student clubs, speech codes and other areas of school life are undermining the educational mission of our schools...When people are this far apart, every act by one side is seen as a hostile move by the other. A "Day of Silence" to protest treatment of gays and lesbians is now followed by a "Day of Truth" to promote conservative religious views of homosexuality. A T-shirt proclaiming "Straight Pride" is worn to counter one professing "Gay Pride."
  • School wins Muslim dress appeal. A school which was told it unlawfully excluded a Muslim pupil for wearing a traditional gown has won its appeal at the House of Lords. The Court of Appeal had said Denbigh High School had denied Shabina Begum the right to manifest her religion in refusing to allow her to wear a jilbab.