Barry Bonds is on the tail end of a career that will quite likely see him enshrined in the Hall of Fame. While Bonds is a great athlete, he became so with the help of steroids, and passed many people who worked hard to get up the homerun list without chemical enhancement. While there are a number of fans who feel Bonds should not be in the Hall, the number of fans who are cheering him on to the record regardless seem to be shouting louder.

Kavvya Viswanathan, a Harvard undergraduate, is a newly discovered plagiarist. Though she protests her book wasn't intentionally plagiarized, there are significant lifts from a number of sources that have been found in her published material. Because she is a discovered plagiarist, this should cast doubt in the minds of anyone in the academic community about the originality of her work in high school, work that composed part of the portfolio that would have been used for her consideration to this prestigious institute of higher learning. While there are a few voices stating that she should be expelled from Harvard, the voices arguing against it are FAR more pervasive, in one case to compare her expulsion from an institution of higher learning that VOLUNTARILY enrolled her with the incarceration behind bars for life of a convicted felon (believe me, I've been behind bars...being kicked out of ONE college doesn't compare).

All of this causes me to wonder: why am I teaching my children not to cheat? As our standards of right and wrong begin to deteriorate, it would seem to m that if I am raising up honest kids to compete as adults in a world where others are NOT honest, I am not fairly equipping them for the world. If my children submit honest resumes to an HR department with an inbox full of those who are falsified and who feel they will simply apologize AFTER the fact, what chance do they have? Sure, they'll have the knowledge that they are being principled by being honest, but principle, for all its value, doesn't pay the rent.

We need to be concerned about those who would take shortcuts to success. While we may feel a need to pity them, if we reward them for cheating, we are sending the wrong message to those who try hard not to cheat. Rules, as they say, are rules, but we are living in a society that increasingly believes rules, like records, were meant to be broken.

To answer my own question, I am teaching my children not to cheat because it's a standard I believe in and try to follow. I am finding it increasingly likely, thought, that they will be strongly tempted to reject those values as they grow older and see the successes of those who do not. I think we need to take a long hard look at cheaters and refuse to honor them as our nation's best and brightest. Because if we don't take a hard stance against them, what are we telling those who would follow behind?