The New York Times' Randy Cohen: Ethicist, Columnist, Socialist?
As Times Watch has noted before,
even when New York Times' ethics columnist Randy Cohen is taking a
conservative's side, he manages to slide in his liberal - or in this
case socialist - opinion.
Here's a question posed in
Cohen's latest edition of "The Ethicist," which can be read every week in the Times' Sunday Magazine:
While teaching as a substitute at a public high school, I noticed a lot of partisan propaganda taped to the outside of a colleague's office door. He teaches wood shop and world history, and this material is unrelated to both. It included the Jokeresque image of President Obama with the word "socialist" underneath. I regard my students as a captive audience and think that sharing my political or religious views in the classroom walks a hazy ethical line. (I certainly do not publicly disparage a president.) Does my colleague cross that line? T.P.,ARIZONA
Cohen
argued no, and defended the other teacher's right to tape anti-Obama
stuff to his door. But he also quibbled with the unfair stigma applied
to the word "socialist."
...Incidentally, not that the president is one, but how does it defame a person to call him a "socialist" (outside of nutty far-right circles) - a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation?
Clay Waters is editor of Times Watch. You can follow him on Twitter.
