Oh, heck, let’s see how Larry polls against the GOP field…

In Colorado’s Cabarrus County, the family of Larry Upright, 81, concluded his on-line funeral home obituary with this…

“Also, the family respectfully asks that you do not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. R.I.P. Grandaddy.”

I can’t resist this one, and so your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is:

Is it ethical for a family to include a political message in a family member’s obituary?

My view? I certainly sympathize, since I find the willingness of so many Americans to vote for someone whose complete dearth of honesty, integrity, transparency, decency and ethics generally is so obvious portends the collapse of civilization. Nonetheless, the obituary crosses a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

The family rationalizes that Larry was a Republican and politically engaged, but that’s irrelevant. The funeral home’s offer of  cyber-space to honor a loved one is not an open invitation to deliver a blog post, a movie review, a dirty joke, or a political endorsement. This isn’t disrespectful of the dead, exactly; it’s disrespectful of everything else: tradition, good taste, Larry’s Hillary-admiring friends, American society. Everything in life doesn’t have to become a partisan dispute; everything shouldn’t be. This is already a divisive trend, and Larry Upright’s family is doing its small part to make American society more unpleasant, divided, and nasty than it already is.