Morality

We're still legislating and regulating private morality, while at the same time ignoring the much larger crisis of public morality in America. In recent weeks, Republican state legislators have decided to thwart the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to have an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy. Legislators in North Dakota passed a bill banning abortions after six weeks or after a fetal heartbeat had been detected, and approved a fall referendum that could ban all abortions by defining human life as beginning with conception.

The Obama White House has been trying to de-legitimize Fox News almost from the day it took office. Remember the media blitz of 2009 launched by then White House Communications Director Anita Dunn? I stood with Fox on that one on principle and came away impressed with the almost tribal unity that Roger Ailes inspired in his troops in the face of White House pressure. Ailes showed more of that Thursday with a memo sent to the Fox newsroom. Read it below, and try to tell me he's not right.

Richard Weikart is correct that Dr. Ben Carson should not be opposed as a commencement speaker at Emory University, as Dr. Carson's accomplishments provide ample justification for this honor ("Evolution and morality," May 13). Mr. Weikart, however, is very wrong to suggest that Dr. Carson might be justified in opposing evolution on the grounds that it threatens morality. There are three ways that evolution might be said to threaten morality, none of which are persuasive. First, one might argue that the idea of "survival of the fittest" can be used to justify eugenics.

Apparently Tavon White, the leader of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang at the Baltimore City Detention Center, has been running the prison for some time ("Corruption alleged at jail," April 24). To connect the dots between violent crime, simply follow the money - it leads to the group's drug trafficking. Power, and the money that generates it, drive illegal businesses. Excitement, money and power are pumped up on sound systems and flat screen TVs across the country. That makes it sexy to sell and use drugs and even to be a gang member.

I was a passenger in a car on Thursday morning, and we stopped for a fill-up at a gas station on North Charles Street in Baltimore, a block up from North Avenue. I was on the phone while the driver purchased and pumped the gasoline. A young, male panhandler tried to make eye contact with me through the passenger's side window, but I avoided being drawn into his tractor beam. Some panhandlers appear broken and docile, some seem impatient and even angry; some have yellow heroin eyes or some other form of medicated stare.

Republicans have morality upside down. They're condemning gay marriage, abortion, access to contraception, and the wall separating church and state. But the moral crisis in America isn't a breakdown in private morality. It's a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us. We're living through a new Gilded Age of financial fraud and conflicts of interest; exorbitant pay to executives, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers; tax loopholes that allow them to pay a lower rate than many middle-class Americans; and legalized bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

THE VOICE from the airwaves was anonymous -- it could have been Everyman, or in this case every woman distressed about lingering adultery charges against presidents Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy and Gary Hart: "We've got to stop obsessing about the private affairs of politicians."What about Bob Packwood?"Oh," she says, "that's different. That's really bad."Suddenly I was transfixed. That's it, I thought, the new emerging morality in a nutshell: What you do to your wife doesn't matter; it's how you treat your employees that counts.

Almost 500 Emory University faculty and students have expressed their dismay that their commencement speaker on Monday does not toe the ideological line when it comes to evolutionary biology. Yes - gasp - the renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson does not believe in evolutionary theory. Not only that, but biology professors at Emory and their supporters also accuse Dr. Carson of committing a thought crime because he allegedly "equates acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality.

It is unfortunate that President Bush chose to invoke "morality" to justify his decision to seek renewal of normal trading relations with China. "Morality" was the least of his considerations. His concern was strictly geopolitical, as seen through the prism (critics call it his blind eye) of his own diplomatic experience in Beijing.Despite China's human rights violations, its regressive Marxism, its irresponsible sales of missiles and nuclear equipment and its unfair trading practices, Mr. Bush determined it was in America's interest to continue so-called most-favored-nation trade policies with China.

THE MORAL argument for intervening against Saddam Hussein's slaughter of rebelling Kurds and Shiites was never answered by the Bush people. They didn't have to answer it really. They had the popularity polls on their side.In politics, government and diplomacy as practiced nowadays, morality can be invoked when it suits a case and ignored when it is inconvenient, but the need for strong popularity polls is absolutely vital.Stalin is said to have laughed away the question of Vatican authority in world affairs by asking how many divisions the pope had. George Bush could have dismissed the moralists with much the same reply.

I did a double take reading your editorial that excused Maryland lawmakers for raiding $1 billion from the state's transportation trust fund to spend on other programs ("We all benefit from transit, and we should all pay for it" Mar 25). Let's explore the logic further. Imagine your neighborhood bank loans an individual money to start a small business. That individual changes his mind and instead uses the money to remodel his home. With a straight face, he informs the bank he's not going to repay the first loan, but expects a second one because he's finally getting around to starting that business.

We're still legislating and regulating private morality, while at the same time ignoring the much larger crisis of public morality in America. In recent weeks, Republican state legislators have decided to thwart the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to have an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy. Legislators in North Dakota passed a bill banning abortions after six weeks or after a fetal heartbeat had been detected, and approved a fall referendum that could ban all abortions by defining human life as beginning with conception.

In the Netflix miniseries "House of Cards," Kate Mara plays a young reporter deeply involved in the world of Washington politics. But the 30-year-old performer says she has no particular interest in journalism or political life. She's just acting the part under the tutelage of screenwriter Beau Willimon and director David Fincher. "I'm not interested in politics or being a part of them," she said in a teleconference this week. "I definitely do my homework and make sure I know what's going on and am responsible enough to be able vote for people I respect and that kind of thing...

I found your recent article about speed cameras most disturbing ("Losses claimed on speed cameras," March 13). It brings to light why this program was a failure from the start. Not once is it mentioned that the main purposes of the cameras to protect public safety by curbing speeding and aggressive driving. Your story only mentions the cost of the equipment compared to the revenue it generates and how much the city and the camera operator make off the devices. Have we lost sight of the fact that these tools are to intended to increase safety on the roadways, not become a primary source or revenue?

The General Assembly voted to repeal the death penalty Friday, calling for an end to Maryland's 375-year history of capital punishment and joining a growing number of states outlawing the practice. After nearly two hours of impassioned debate, the House of Delegates approved Gov. Martin O'Malley's repeal legislation, 82-56, sending the measure to the governor for his signature. The state Senate voted 27-20 for repeal last week. "We're a better state for ending it," said Del. Sandy Rosenberg, a Democrat from Baltimore who has long pushed for repeal.

Dr. Ben Carson says he didn't anticipate the reaction to what he considered his common-sense remarks as keynote speaker this month at the National Prayer Breakfast. But after video went viral of the trailblazing black neurosurgeon taking jabs at Barack Obama's health care overhaul a few feet from the president himself, some want the famed doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to parlay the attention into a new career: politics. "Here you have this guy who has been a celebrity minority for 30 years coming out and making the conservative case better than a lot of conservatives can," said Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large for National Review Online.

WHY DID ALL the weight of the Bush administration come down on General Schwarzkopf for revealing that the decision to abort the war a day too soon was not unanimous -- or as the general later half-clarified, not as originally planned?The reason is that the pre-decision disagreement within the National Security Council was supposed to be kept secret.No president lightly consigns thousands of human beings to certain death. He had personally and publicly assured the Kurdish and Shiite rebels that Saddam's gunships would be grounded; his general on the scene admitted he had been "suckered" into agreeing to let them fly.When a decision is made to place pragmatism above morality -- in this case, to accept historic accountability for choosing military dictatorship over a less orderly system of PTC self-determination -- the president expects his advisers to close ranks, to "sign on" to the decision.

The Double, by Jose Saramago. Harcourt. 336 pages. $25. Most English classes teach us that parables and morality tales are antiquated forms of literature, replaced, in the way of natural evolution, by that creation of hardy Anglo-Saxon realism, the novel. But in truth, what new agers call "wisdom literature" has never left us, and the Portugese writer, Jose Sara-mago, has imbued it with enough highbrow knowingness to win him the 1998 Nobel Prize. In his new novel, The Double, Saramago turns to one of the archetypal themes of world literature, as old as folktale and yet deftly pitched to an age of "identity politics."

All week, it's been Baltimore Ravens 24/7 on the sports channels thanks to Sunday's Super Bowl. But when it comes to cities, all the focus has been on New Orleans, the site of the game, not Baltimore or San Francisco. Tomorrow, Baltimore finally gets a little bit of face time, ranging from CNN reporting on what the Super Bowl has meant to fans in Baltimore to Natalie Morales squirrel dancing at the Inner Harbor for NBC's "Today" show. The Mayor's Office has been told by CNN that the cable news channel will air a feature on the city between 9 and 11 a.m. Friday.

Has anyone thought about the correlation between today's gun violence today and the decline of moral and religious values since the 1940s, '50s and early '60s? In those decades we allowed God in our schools, courts and businesses. Parents were allowed to discipline children when necessary (and the children survived). We were taught to respect our elders, hold doors for others and allow a vehicle to merge into our lane without a case of road rage. It did not take a village to raise a child.