First the Catholic Church and now college football: more child sex predators slithering in the dark recesses of institutions that would rather perpetuate themselves than protect children. College sports programs already treat their athletes like slaves. So why are we surprised by their ability to look themselves in the mirror each morning—for years and years, it turns out—while the child victim tally rises?Good thing the president of Penn State University and head coach Joe Paterno have been fired. Paterno even had the gall to assume he could stay on until the end of the season. What a creep. Everyone involved deserves to be eating boiled hash browns and protecting the sovereignty of their, ahem, defensive lines down at the county jail. Nittany Lions, meet the Nazi Low Riders. Chief creep, former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, paused way too long when NBC sportscaster Bob Costas asked him if he was sexually attracted to young boys. Sandusky repeated the question—always a bad sign. He then offered a rambling, creepy answer that involved how much he loves children. The only correct answer to this question is “No” followed by “Fuck no.”The entire Nov. 14 interview was the most compelling piece of sports television news in recent memory. If you have not yet seen it, you should. Football is sacred in this country. They say baseball is our national pastime, but in reality, it’s football all the way. In some places school is canceled on Friday for a game on Saturday. Not the day after, the day before. On those Fridays, Wal-Marts look like the apocalypse is imminent. Checkout lines stretch all the way to electronics. RO*TEL runs out at noon. If the team loses, everyone is morose Monday morning. An institution that only fawning eyes gaze upon makes a great hideout for predators. It’s a place where the status quo must be maintained, even if it means covering up horrible things. Sex fiends seek and join these sacred institutions, the perfect cover for their insidious deeds. The people who make up the faithful mindlessly accept behavior that should appall them. For example, a newspaper I worked for once ran a political cartoon on the subject of pedophile priests. The next day there were about 40 protesters outside the newsroom demanding a retraction. Their beef? There are no pedophile priests. It’s all a conspiracy to make Catholics look bad. It seemed unlikely that anyone would stand up for the Penn State perps. But students massed on campus in defense of Paterno. Somebody should ask these folks: “So, when did you realize you were in favor of child rape?” Will the Penn State molestation cover-up be the only one of its ilk, or will victims start speaking up at different colleges, different programs? Will this thing go wide like the priest scandal? I’ve never been a proponent of vigilante justice. But I wonder why, when former graduate assistant Mike McQueary walked into a shower and caught Sandusky assaulting a 10-year-old boy, he didn’t grab the man, slam him on the ground and call the police. He claimed in an email to a friend he "did stop it, not physically … but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room." That’s a milquetoast reaction to child rape. It’s still unclear if McQueary called the cops. The police are denying that he did. McQueary is now a coach for Penn State. Sure, he’s been placed on leave. But he could have been a hero. Not a fake gridiron hero, but a real hero.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
