Ethics Headlines            


Volume 1, Number 20
                            Friday, May 20, 2005


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clippling 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--click on the headline to read the full article
  • Sperm banks: Who's your daddy?  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's effort to ban gay sperm donors is misguided. New FDA safety and screening standards for sperm banks, which take effect Wednesday, include strict requirements for testing and retesting donors for HIV.
  • The Vatican's sin of omission. In 1930s and 1940s Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution that possessed the moral stature and strength to denounce and forbid the murder of the Jews. It did not do so.
  • Meanwhile: A song and a victory that ring hollow. Naomi Shemer confessed on her deathbed to the greatest sin of her life: Her immortal song, "Jerusalem of Gold," is a copy of a Basque lullaby.
  • Who profits from rock-bottom pricing? They pay low wages and force local shops to close. But discount chains help the poor make ends meet. Do they belong in your portfolio?
  • Newsweek says Koran desecration report is wrong. Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.
  • Congress needs to limit pay of executives at nonprofits. Compensation for nonprofit bosses has hit levels that ought to have donors and taxpayers asking: Remind me again -- exactly whom is this organization supposed to be benefiting?
  • Lack of commitment turns 'I do' vow into 'Maybe I do'. "We live in a culture that's so risk-averse, where people don't want to jump in and really decide 'I'm in' or 'I'm out.' The idea of the wedding day is you look your about-to-be mate in the eye and say, 'I do.' You don't say, 'Maybe I do.'
  • Africa's most wanted man. Charles Taylor faces 17 charges of crimes against humanity and similar offences, not for what he did to his homeland, but for the horrors he inflicted on its neighbour, Sierra Leone.
  • Hugging ban sparks dispute at Oregon school. Public displays of affection are against the rules at Sky View Middle School in Bend, and 14-year-old Cazz Altomare found that out the hard way. She got detention earlier this year after hugging her boyfriend in the hallway as he headed to lunch and she went to gym class.
  • Army to spend day retraining recruiters. Responding to reports about widespread abuses of the rules for recruitment, Army officials said yesterday that they would suspend all recruiting on May 20 and use the day to retrain its personnel in military ethics and the laws that govern what can and cannot be done to enlist an applicant.
  • Academic overreach. The boycott of two Israeli universities ... by Britain's Association of University Teachers illustrates the perils of impassioned academics indulging in politics by gesture.
  • It's not just the yahoos against aggressive sex ed. Resistance to anything-goes sexual preaching in the schools is routinely depicted as a phenomenon of conservative Christians, but in an analysis of health textbooks, Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council says that the sexual assumptions of the aggressive "health lobby" offend lots of Americans of all faiths and none.
  • Government backs doctors in right-to-life case. The British government today intervened directly in a right-to-life case...with a message to judges that giving patients the right to demand lfe-prolonging treatment would have "very serious implications" for the National Health Service.
  • The evolution of creationism. The latest struggle over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools provides striking evidence that evolution is occurring before our eyes. Every time the critics of Darwinism lose a battle over the teaching of biology, they evolve into a new form, armed with arguments that sound more benign, while remaining as dangerous as ever.
  • Give me your tired ... and abused? Should a victim of domestic violence in another country be granted asylum in the United States - broadening yet again the scope of who finds refuge in the US?

Previous Weeks' Headlines