"Your country ain't your blood kid!"
Posted on 01/31/2012 8:44:20 AM PST by Neverforget01
When the hundreds of thousands of Penn State alumni hear the name JoePa, they think of moral leadership, of the kind of person they aspire to be. Of his warmth, his fatherliness, his steadiness, and his granite character. Joe Paterno was for hundreds of thousands of alumni the very model of the moral ideal of Western humanism.
Hundreds of thousands of alumni think a huge injustice was committed against JoePa by the board of trustees, and they have emphatically expressed their sentiments to the new interim president of Penn State during his coast-to-coast series of alumni meetings to damp down the great anger he is encountering.
First news of the Sandusky scandal, in which longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused of sexually molesting underage boys, broke in March 2011, and it came before the board of trustees that June. They said it was not a Penn State problem, because Sandusky had left the university in 1999, though he continued to use an office there for several more years. It was a problem for the institution Sandusky had founded, the Second Mile organization for youngsters.
Then, quite suddenly in November 2011, with a huge national scandal erupting, the board suddenly acted as if the burden were on them. They did not weigh their own responsibility, their own inaction, their own failure to get to the bottom of the scandal of five months earlier. In a fit of what to many alumni seems to have been fear for themselves, the board’s members ducked their own responsibility, and in the most ignoble and impersonal way, made JoePa, the moral giant of Penn State, a moral outcast.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Law enforcement. Period. End of story.
He didn't do it. His inaction allowed God only knows how many more kids to be raped. Period. End of story.
Well said. All the people on here trashing Joe ignore the profound and positive impact he had on thousands of people. That was evident at the service.
For those calling him evil, get a grip. If there is another coach who has given as much to charity or given as much back to his university as Paterno, I’d like to hear the name.
I’d just like to add this quote from Graham Spanier:
“With regard to the other presentments, I wish to say that Tim Curley and Gary Schultz have my unconditional support.”
I agree. Of Course.
I do not understand the lack of ANGER on the part of Joe Paterno and McQueary. Wouldn’t you just want to run over to Sandusky’s house and smack him. Here he is using YOUR gym to conduct illegal sex acts and hurt children. He is using YOUR program as credibility to solicit these kids.
Paterno not only did NOT have a legal obligation to go to the police, the police in this situation could not have done anything because in PA and I’m sure elsewhere police cannot act on secondhand information. Paterno did what he was supposed to do with the information he had which by all accounts was vague.
You have no idea of what specifically McQueary told Paterno. Until you know that, you cannot very well assume that there was probable cause that a crime had been committed. The theory that we all have an obligation to go running to nanny (or fifteen different bureaucratic nannies) every time that we become aware that there is a vague possibility of criminal behavior is a prescription for turning our country into Central Europe circa 1935. No thanks.
As I understand it, Paterno was not a mandatory reporter under Pennsylvania law at the time. So much for legal obligations. He had a lot of moral obligations. If he were CONVINCED that a single instance of criminal sexual assault on a minor by Sandusky had, in fact, occurred, I would agree that he had a moral obligation to report to police, and prosecutors and, if necessary to judges. Beyond that, despite his great prominence and his status as a respected and revered member of the local community, there was not much more he could do. He did report to the appropriate school authority who was in charge of the only police department likely to respond. Wishing and hoping that the other police authorities would step on the toes of the Penn State PD gets you as far as Obozo wishing and hoping for economic recovery.
Should Paterno have had a sandwich board made up and personally picketed Schultz's office or the courthouse?
What if Paterno, who certainly knew McQueary better than thee or me, thought McQueary was adequate as an assistant football coach but had the credibility of a moonbeam or of a crackpot like Ron Paul, or of a serial liar like Mitt Romney? Was he supposed to start running to every nanny in sight if he was CONVINCED that the evidence given to him totally lacked credibility? Hey, we all have but one life to live and ought not waste it on fantasies (if that's what Paterno thought he was dealing with). Unless he subjectively believed whatever he was told and unless what he was told amounted to probable cause (more likely true than not applying normal standards of judgment) he had an obligation not to engage in defamation by passing on unreliable rumors. He might have, in any event, told McQueary to do the reporting since Paterno was not a witness at all and McQueary apparently claimed to be a witness, the only available one, in some unknown way. No one but Sandusky could know the name of the victim, if any.
Neither you or I KNOW what Joe Paterno thought or even what McQueary told him specifically since McQueary has three different mutually exclusive stories(one of the indicia of unreliability when judging credibility. There is a reason why we insist on due process of law, on the right to confront one's accusers and cross-examine them, on the right of discovery of facts, documents and other evidence pre-trial, on the right to have appeals heard in the case of errors, etc.
When I lived in Connecticut, the late and great (IMHO) Most Rev. John F. Whealon, Archbishop of Hartford (ca. 1971-1991) was accused by the Hartford Courant of having become a registered Republican voter (suggesting that he was about to pull a stealth coup by leading the entire body of Catholics of the Archdiocese of Hartford into (gulp!) the GOP. The archbishop responded in the diocesan newspaper to the effect that the abortion issue had made it impossible for him to continue as a Democrat even though, as a political liberal, he agreed with the Democrats on what he called the little issues: social security, medicare, welfare, wars, spending on weapons, etc. He said that the Democrats were always right on the little issues but had been grievously wrong on the two biggest issues in their history: slavery and abortion. He also reminded them that it was the Courant and not he who had publicized his change of registration. He understood moral obligations and that they need not be splashily written across the sky. How do you know whom, if anyone, Paterno contacted about the McQueary rumor? I don't either.
Please read Michael Novak's NRO column, Ben Novak's lengthy piece on how this mess occurred and the statewide grand jury report rather than merely sensationalized press coverage by self-congratulatory howling mobs of ignorant sports opinion writers, eager to beat their brethren in the competition over who can get out ahead of the pack to get the first bite of the corpse of an 85-year old man of considerable honor and distinction.
Joe Paterno, if he was a culprit at all, is most certainly not the main culprit. That would appear to be Sandusky. Each and every other employee of the university who had to do with knowledge of this matter or investigatory responsibility had a GREATER obligation.
I refuse to deal with claims of ethical lapses because, in my experience, infinitely flexible and malleable "ethics" is what moral relativist liberals (not you) substitute for those rigid old morals that are generally prescribed by God Who seems impervious to their desires to render good as evil and vice versa.
Please also read my #77 and, if you can get a copy of it, The Franklin Coverup which details even more horrendous evils by a Omaha, Nebraska satanic cult which not only exploited and abused to the nth degree young boys obtained out of juvenile detention but then had them blow each other away with shotguns while the perps watched. The perps included police officials, judges, FBI and a wide swath of perverted "community leaders." I don't claim that Penn State was that bad but it would be a very strong template for elitist abuse of children with the special extra of the still unresolved murders and other crimes. The author was a state legislative committee chairman charged with investigating.
Since I am a computer illiterate, I am asking WPaCon if he can post a link to the grand jury report which appeared in full in the New York Slimes.
Ping to the Grand Jury Report BlackElk asked me to post.
I could be wrong, but I think it later came out that not everything in the Grand Jury Report was actually accurate.
BlackElk was a lawyer (and I am not) and may be able to comment on whether Grand Jury Reports such as this one are typically completely accurate or not.
All I know is a decent humnan being would have told Sandusky you are not welcome to use these showers anymore.
Thanks for posting the grand jury report. May God bless you and yours.
My solution, if I had been in Paterno's shoes, would have been to encourage a couple of 300+ pound offensive or defensive line men to keep watch and work out by working Sandusky over, especially if he ever entered the shower room with a kid and, if he were caught in flagrante, to rough him up and take him and the kid to the Penn State police for further inquiry and medical care for the kid (involving his parent or parents) and appropriate charges against Sandusky. The perp could be held until the next court session on "speedy information" without a court warrant. Then, deem the commission of a crime on premises to be a breach of contract (in all likelihood) and have an injunction enter barring Sandusky from the entire campus and from contact with minors. Again, Paterno would have no standing to bring such a lawsuit but the administrative big shots would.
May God bless you and yours too!
You’re wrong. I don’t give a **** what his legal obligations were. His moral obligation was to report the rapist to law enforcement. Jopa (spit) is rotting in Hades now, getting his just due for failing to protect children.
Personally I hope Satan himself is holding what is left of his miserable soul up against a locker room wall and boning him up the backside for eternity while he screams out to God himself for mercy.
And I hope God ignores his cries just like Paterno did.
Have a nice evening.
Pretending Paterno - mighty legend, statue model Joe freakin’ Paterno - didn’t have say over whether or not a suspected (at best) child rapist was allowed on Penn State grounds, much less HIS locker room, is the exact type of metal gymnastics that makes being a JoPalogist so embarrassing.
I have learned from several of the Paterno threads that animosity toward Paterno runs deep and I am uncertain as to whether it is a result of this case or existed prior. If it is this case, it is because folks read headlines, not details.
That being said, it will be interesting to see what becomes of the investigations. McQueary's multiple versions may compromise the cases against Schultz and Curley, but hopefully the boys who have come forward will be able to convict Sandusky.
Curley and Shultz must have done something because Sandusky's keys were taken away in 2002. Also interesting to note Gov Corbett was AG in 2009 and was given this case. As Gov and member of the BOT, he has a lot of questions to answer.
No I realize your point but my point was that the editorialists were actually stating that the sentences should be lighter for the those who abuse the older group.
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