The above title sums up the thoughts that seized my mind when I first heard about the child sex abuse scandal that has Penn State University reeling today.
It stems from allegations that 67-year-old Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant coach of the storied Nittany Lions football team, used a group home he founded for troubled boys as a plucking ground for his pedophile pleasure.
Reports are that he abused 9 boys over a 15-year period (1994-2009). But anyone who knows anything about pederasts must suspect that Sandusky has many other victims who are still too traumatized or just too embarrassed to come forward. (It is also reasonable to suspect that there are coaches at other universities who have abused, and are still abusing, their power to prey on little children in a similar vein.)
To make matters worse, if that’s even possible, all of the top officials associated with the team / university, most notably 84-year-old Head Coach Joe Paterno, allegedly knew about this abuse almost from the outset, but decided not to report it to the police. This, even though these officials were told by another assistant coach, Mike McQueary, way back in 2002 that he was drawn one Friday night by “rhythmic slapping noises” to the showers in the team’s locker room where he saw a 10-year-old boy naked and pinned up against the wall – in arrest formation – with Sandusky behind literally raping him.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing
(Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace)
All too belatedly, Sandusky was outed and finally arrested on Saturday along with Athletic Director Tim Curly and Vice President for Finance Gary Shultz – both of whom were charged with not reporting the sexual abuse to police and lying to a grand jury under oath during the investigation. And Paterno announced just moments ago that he will resign at the end of the season.
But all of them were clearly involved in a conspiracy to cover up the ongoing sexual abuse of little boys. And truth be told, I’m wondering if they refused to report Sandusky because he was procuring these boys for their pedophile pleasure too…?
After all, my humanity is such that I can only imagine other pedophiles working and socializing (as Paterno and others did) with a man they have good reason to suspect is going back to his group home for little boys and raping them every friggin’ night?!
Which brings me to the God-must-be-dead precedent set by the Catholic church.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Well, in an admittedly cynical way, this logic might be applied to those who keep reacting to revelations about child sex abuse over and over again with the same moral outrage.
Frankly, I don’t see how anyone can have any moral outrage left after revelations that one of the biggest pedophile rings the world has ever known was comprised of Catholic bishops and priests….
This is why, instead of wasting what little moral outrage I can still muster on child sex abusers, I just react by wishing them a fair trial, followed by a lifetime in prison having “big” men do to them what they did to little children. And Sandusky will surely get his; i.e., if he doesn’t take the coward’s way out by hanging himself (which for this diabolical pervert might just amount to the ultimate in autoerotic asphyxiation … coming and going at the same time).
But let me hasten to add that I believe the same fate should befall all of those who knew about this abuse and failed to report it … not to university officials, but to the police. That clearly includes Sandusky’s three conspiring stooges Paterno, Curly, and Shultz. But just as I suspect there are more victims, I suspect there are other professed good men (and they are almost always … men) who knew about this abuse and did nothing. Their motivation of course was to protect the big-money enterprise Penn State football has become.
I know many will consider it punishment enough that Paterno is resigning in disgrace. The outpouring of support among misguided students – for whom football is a religion and Paterno a demigod – is testament to this fact. But I suspect it will dawn on some of these idol-worshipping nincompoops soon enough that they might not be able to complete their four years after the university is forced to hike tuition and fees to settle the civil lawsuits that are bound to be filed.
In any case, nobody in his right mind would argue that decades of pastoring are sufficient mitigation to grant leniency to bishops who stood by and allowed pedophile priests to serially rape little boys. Therefore, nobody should argue that decades of coaching are sufficient mitigation to grant leniency to coaches who stood by and allowed pedophile assistants to do the same.
Accordingly, not only should the university force him to resign immediately, but prosecutors should have him arrested to boot.
Beyond this I think the NCAA should give the Nittany Lions the “death penalty” (i.e., indefinite expulsion) – particularly because this child sex abuse scandal makes all of the booster-paying-player infractions for which other schools have been expelled seem petty by comparison.
Related commentaries:
NCAA death penalty…
* This commentary was published originally yesterday, Wednesday, at 1:35 pm. Hours later the trustees fired both Paterno and the president of the university … effective immediately.
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