Interesting; I know that Spanier had been a perv promoter for a long time but did not know that he was hired specifically to push perversion.
IMHO Paterno was just as guilty as any of the other enablers. Why? Because he did not create a huge stink, and because he and many others did not, more boys were raped. There is no doubt at all that he knew what was going on. Maybe not every single eensy weensy detail, but he knew that Sandusky was a boy raper.
Football/money were more important than the fact that boys from bad homes were being raped by elites.
I wasn’t suggesting that Paterno should be let off the hook.
He did what he was supposed to do—reported what he had heard and knew to his superiors and put the burden on them to handle it, as he was supposed to do. And it was those superiors, and the state and county officials who also were informed at various times, who failed to act.
They probably said that they needed time to handle it, to reduce the fallout damage to the university. And they were the bosses. So, you could say that Paterno did his job, and left it to his superiors to handle it.
But. . . . Although this can be argued, I agree that it’s not enough in the case of child rape. At some point, when he realized that his superiors were covering up rather than organizing a solution—and perhaps lying to him about it and failing to do the right thing—he should have acted, and to hell with the chain of command.
But I think it’s fair to say that he is less to blame than a number of other people. He was focused on by the media, I think, for two reasons—one, because he was seen as a supposed hero who was revealed to have feet of clay, and two, because the MSM never misses a chance to badmouth a Catholic. This even gave them an excuse to raise the pederast priest issue once again, although there was really no connection.
Of course, there was no hint whatever that gay rights and academic LGBT friendliness might have anything to do with it.