Ethics Headlines
#65           

Volume 2, Number 13
                            Friday, March 31, 2006 (Happy Bday!)


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
  • Convert tests faith in democracy.  Forty-one-year-old Afghan Abdul Rahman,  faces execution after converting to Christianity from Islam. Islamic sharia law considers a Muslim an apostate for leaving his religion, even for Judaism or Christianity, which are recognised by Islam as "religions of the book" and acceptable. "Cut off his head!" said cleric Abdul Raoulf, considered a moderate who had opposed the Taliban. He told The Washington Post that "we will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left. Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die."
    • Islamic purity. The State Department has had a profound question to ask itself in the matter of Abdul Rahman. Did we intend to make a theatrical point -- that we would not stand by in his condemnation and beheading, an arrant interference with the right of a human being to embrace Christianity? Or would we just settle for saving Rahman's life?
    • Conversion to modernity, the Islamic approach. Modernity is the challenge for Islam. Muslims must seek the same accommodation to religious freedom that protects the faithful and empowers private individuals to make liberating, fulfilling choices in their own lives.
  • Affirmative Action for White Men, Chap. 4,651. It isn't often that someone owns up to flagrant sex discrimination in the op-ed page of the New York Times, so I suppose we should be grateful to Kenyon College dean of admissions Jennifer Britz for her honesty. In "To All the Girls I've Rejected" she admits what many parents of girls suspect: Boys have an edge in college admissions.
  • 'Marriage Is for White People'. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the [6th grade] class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title. "That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children." "Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."
    And that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."