Perhaps the most difficult legal ethics’ dilemma currently before us is the power and role of the President’s authority and that of Congress. I thought that it would be helpful to have a blog from John Yoo, my former student in ethics. He is a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School, has worked in the Department of Justice, and is the “go to guy” for Fox News when conservatives are confronted with difficult and controversial legal problems. There is a video of the current ethics dilemma in Washington at the end. John is an expert on the power of the Presidency. He sent me an inscribed copy of his book, Crisis and Command. He wrote inside, “To Reverend Squire who first set me on the path to teaching. Best wishes! John Yoo.” He is a member of the faculty of the Law School at California Berkeley. While at EA I invited John to come to our school and express his viewpoint to our community.
John typically sat front and center in my ethics class and was an engaging and respectful student with different opinions in discussions of controversial topics and ethical systems of thought. When there was a diversity of points of view in our school, I always tried to present ideas along a spectrum from conservative, middle of the road (the via media), and liberal, giving my view at the end.
The same was true in Chapel with many addresses that were given on faith, morality, and character. The Vestry or student leadership group worked closely with me in deciding what was going to occur in chapel and why. They had their hands on the pulse of the students. Given the diversity of ideas, from conservative to liberal, I had people who kept track of how many women and men, conservative and liberal speakers we had in chapel. Although the Vestry and I did attempt to honor that spectrum of points of view, it was impossible to always do so. We went with what would be most helpful for the community to hear without the numbers game. It was real student leadership. I was the coach, and the student leaders were the players except when something went south. Then it was on me. I likened chapel to a family photo album. You must see the whole not just one of the parts of roughly 90 services per academic year. Remember the coach is not the important entity in sports, the student leaders are.
I mention all of this because we don’t have the above model as a culture. There are silos of news. Fox is conservative. NPR and CNN are liberal while nobody is exposed to the other side or middle of the road. I suppose that the closest we get to that is the BBC. Ethics is about choice, and I wanted the students to make informed choices.
I made sure that I told outside guest speakers to consider that our community is diverse. You can say what you believe as an outside speaker, but don’t tell my community what they should believe or else. Let your personal story inform and inspire! I have two situations in mind to illustrate this point. There are two moments that come to mind when the school community was almost offended or inadvertently offended. One speaker told me that he didn’t care what I said, he would say what he wanted to say. He was shocked when I said, “Then you’re not speaking!” It was a tense ten minutes before the service as he had been invited to speak by a family in our school which he reminded me of, but he blinked and did it my way. The second person was an individual of national renown who got a few laughs by mentioning women’s breasts in a joke and he couldn’t let the image go. I had the women students and faculty lined up at my door after the service, rightly so.
I called his office and told him that he offended the women in the congregation. He assumed that I was calling him to tell him what a great job he had done. He was in shock by how he had offended members of the school. He did volunteer to come back and apologize, but I couldn’t trust him to make matters worse. I apologized to the students and faculty before the next service and indicated that he apologized as well.
Why do I share all the above? It is because the number one reason that parents send their children to independent schools is safety. Academics, Sports, Religion are all up there too.
Therefore, the number one job of any leader and, in my case, the spiritual leader of a community, is to keep my people safe. The number one job of the President is to protect and keep his people safe. How is Trump doing with that? Now his Republican colleagues are pushing back hard as his actions have hit policies in their states such as research done at hospitals.
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