Salon.com > Penn State

Rick Santorum: Liberal Penn State punished me for being conservative

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Rick Santorum hates college. The former senator from Pennsylvania and current presidential candidate has lately taken to declaring that Barack Obama's promotion higher education is both elitist snobbery and a insidious attempt to "indoctrinate" the children of America's hardworking conservative parents into socialism. His crusade against the ivory tower took an even weirder turn last weekend when he told a radio station that he was discriminated against at Penn State for his conservatism.

Will Bunch highlighted the... slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch's):

Married to a pedophile

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:30:00 +0000

When a detective showed Jasmine a video of her husband confessing to sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl, she says, "It was like a knife through my heart." The 43-year-old creator of HealingWives.com, an online support group for women with similar experiences, explains, "I felt like a victim myself -- I mean, in an instant, my world changed."

The experiences of the wives of child abusers are rarely focused on, but the headline-driving allegations against former college coaches Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine are changing that. A recently released tape recording of a conversation between one of Fine's alleged victims and the coach's wife, Laurie Davis, appears to reveal that she knew about her husband's inappropriate sexual behavior. (CNN reported that Davis will claim that the recording was doctored.) Plenty have questioned whether Sandusky's wife, Dorothy, could have been entirely unaware of her husband's alleged abuse of boys over a 15-year period. The truth is that, should their husbands be found guilty, these women, along with Jasmine, are members of a unique and pained group; after all, the typical sexual abuser is a married man. How wives respond to the revelation of abuse varies greatly -- from reporting it immediately to convincing themselves, time after time, that it won't happen again. In plenty of cases, they aren't even aware that their husband was attracted to children in the first place, let alone that he would ever abuse a pre-pubescent child.

Alan Dershowitz thinks Joe Paterno was treated unfairly

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Finally, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has weighed in on the firing of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. It is practically a crime that we had to wait this long to hear what "The Dersh" has to say about the largely peripheral figure whose totally justified firing has subsumed most coverage of the horrific crimes alleged to have taken place under his watch. Here's Dershowitz's take: JoePa was treated unfairly, and he shouldn't be held responsible for crimes committed by his underling and covered up by his superiors.

Dershowitz's Harvard Legal Ethics class had a little debate about the Penn State situation. They all agree that Paterno had no legal obligation to do anything after assistant coach Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping children in the locker room shower. But what about his moral obligations?

Why my coach got away with sexual abuse

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Disgust flows freely after reading each new story about Penn State. Why, we wonder, would someone willingly ignore reports of heinous sexual abuse of a child? Why would someone as “good” as Joe Paterno brush aside the alleged despicable and predatory actions of a coach on his staff, a coach representing his Nittany Lions? By all accounts, Paterno was the hero coach, a model of highly invested and supportive team building, a molder of men, a teacher and a mentor. As a thinking, feeling adult, it seems so obvious what the right choice would be. Report Jerry Sandusky to the police. No matter what.

So why are good people likely to do not so good things? Well, in the microcosmic world of hyper-competitive athletics, a high-performance culture where winning trumps all, obvious moral choices become blurred. The sport, the team, a berth on the squad, a medal on the stand – that becomes the priority. The parents, coaches and teams put everything else aside in honor of the win. I know this firsthand.

Less than a few good men

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

You’ll find lurking in every media-maximized sex scandal a man who feels himself in one way or another above the law. Look up “smug” in the political dictionary, and if the first entry isn’t Herman Cain, it will probably say Newt Gingrich, who eagerly pursued Bill Clinton concerning morals charges that may have paled in comparison to his own contemporaneous straying problem. Oops.

Now, let’s compare the other headline-grabbing sex shocker of the week: the concealment by Penn State University of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged fifteen-year rampage, in sexually abusing young boys. There is a common thread between the sordid Sandusky business and Herman Cain’s outrageous behavior when confronted with charges of serial sexual harassment: Power and the belief in one’s invincibility make for a dangerous elixir.

The question that these stories of sexual misconduct raise is a peculiarly American one: Why do our people handle such episodes so badly? The answer lies in the public’s inability to reconcile an admiration for powerful men and powerful institutions with its inevitable consequence of corruption. Blind trust and unalloyed admiration create the atmosphere for abuses of power, for covering up misconduct, and even excusing it when it is revealed.

Jon Stewart flabbergasted by Sandusky interview

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:41:00 +0000

There are a few different ways of looking at the blockbuster phone interview between Bob Costas and Jerry Sandusky on NBC Monday night. On the one hand, you could appreciate the fine work done by Costas, who, on short notice, grilled the former Penn State coach with question after hard-hitting question about the accusations he faces of sexual abuse. On the other hand, you could marvel at the questionable logic applied by Sandusky in granting the interview. Or, as Jon Stewart put it on "The Daily Show" last night:

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me when you're accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, you may not want to literally phone in your defense on national television.

How did my hometown become known for a sex scandal?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I think I was 6 years old, at a day camp in Chautauqua, N.Y., where my family spent a couple of weeks that summer, when a woman pointed a microphone in my face. Maybe a local radio station had shown up at our clubhouse assembly; maybe it was a team of performers. I really don’t remember. What I remember was that this woman asked me a simple, friendly question: “Where are you from?”

I froze. Pennsylvania, I wanted to say, but in my experience, Pennsylvania went on for a very long time, and I was not entirely sure I wasn’t still there. Another pair of words came to mind, but they were both generic and implausible, so I suppressed them. Instead, to the incredulous look of the woman with the microphone and the titters of my fellow campers, I replied, “I don’t know.”

Sandusky admits “horsing around” but denies sex with kids

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:05:00 +0000

Child abuse: We’re making the problem worse

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The alleged Penn State sex abuse scandal may provide a powerful lesson about institutional corruption -- but it's also a good time for some self-examination. The general consensus among experts who treat sex offenders is that America has taken the wrong approach to dealing with child molesters. In fact, some say that we're only making the problem worse.

Just last week, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse conference in Canada surveyed the latest research in the field. The narrative that emerged from the meeting is that we should place a stronger emphasis on something proved to actually reduce the recidivism rate: treatment. The potential for bias here is apparent -- it's like incarceration experts highlighting the importance of incarceration -- but studies show that treatment, particularly group approaches, can be highly effective. (Although, as a 2009 report put it, "Despite these advances we, as a field, continue to fall well short of the community's expectation of 'no more victims.'")

Why didn’t McQueary call the police?

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 20:00:00 +0000

It's a question many are asking as more details emerge from the Penn State scandal: How could you see a child being sexually abused and not intervene?

As a 28-year-old grad student, assistant coach Mike McQueary, now on administrative leave, claims he witnessed Jerry Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the locker room showers. McQueary immediately called his own father to tell him what he'd seen, according to the grand jury report, but waited until the next morning to notify coach Joe Paterno. Even given the powerful institutional hierarchy within the school's football program, which some have gone so far as to compare to the Catholic Church, most find it difficult to imagine standing by as a pre-pubescent boy is allegedly sodomized by a middle-aged man -- no matter who that man is.

Ashton Kutcher’s massive Twitter fail

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

It's really not Ashton Kutcher's month. First, the actor best known for playing lunkheaded stoners found himself embroiled in tawdry accusations of an unprotected extramarital boots knocking with a 22-year-old blonde. Then on Wednesday evening, he committed epic tweet fail by tossing off an outraged response to the dismissal of embattled Penn State coach Joe Paterno. "How do you fire Jo Pa?" he wrote. "#insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste."

As headlines across the world have made clear, the legendary 84-year-old was not ousted this week because of his age or his job performance. Instead, he was fired for his lackadaisical response to charges that former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abused a young boy in a campus locker room. Though Paterno related the alleged incident to his superiors, he did not report any wrongdoing to the police. On Saturday, Sandusky was charged with multiple counts of sex abuse involving eight boys over the course of several years.

The shame of Penn State

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday night, the Penn State Board of Trustees met -- for the first time since the child sex abuse scandal broke -- and subsequently announced that football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier had been fired. No, that's wrong, let's take those names in order of importance – first Graham Spanier and then Joe Paterno. What followed was a jaw-dropping torrent of angry, abusive questions from Penn State students directed to a cowed and bewildered John Surma, vice chairman of the trustees.

With the purpose of clarifying the issues, I'm going to do an instant replay on the questions and help Surma with the answers. (The following questions were taken right off the CNN telecast.)

RedState blogger has amazing Herman Cain theory

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:20:00 +0000

In the midst of an otherwise routine post celebrating Ohio voters' decision to symbolically demonstrate their disapproval of a healthcare reform rule that has yet to go into effect and bemoaning the media's conspiracy of silence on said decision, RedState diarist Dan Perrin makes this totally sane and reasonable observation:

So, this morning, were the lead stories on television that Nancy Pelosi, whose belittling and famous “Are you serious? Are you serious?” response to being asked about the challenge to the ObamaCare individual mandate, was the perfect illustration of her radical and out-of-touch mental state — and that she is as out of touch as former President Bush was when he expressed amazement at grocery store price scanners?

Uh, no. (The media’s obsession with the Penn State sex scandal can be explained by the fact they think it will hurt Herman Cain.)

Emphasis very much mine, because, wow.