Actually all the mental gymnasticizing is taking place on the anti-Paterno side, which is consists solely of Nancy Grace-esque imaginings, supposition and conclusion-jumping as to Paterno’s guilt, whereas I’m standing on the facts and what the actual, tangible evidence shows or doesn’t show.
Thanks for the cite Crotalus, but I knew that Paterno has cancer and that it’s supposed to be treatable. What I hadn’t heard was that he was dying. Just another case of erroneous conclusion-jumping I guess. No surprise, as the thread is full of it.
Do you not understand sarcasm? My point seems to have flown way over your head so let me state it in very simple terms. I do not know Paterno’s motivation for his donation. You do not know Paterno’s motivation for his donation. There is no evidence for any deep abiding love for Penn State. It is just as likely that a man with lung cancer would want to clear his conscience because he fears death as it is that a man has such an overwhelming love for the employer that fired him that he decided to donate money to that employer. As for the child molestation, Paterno himself admitted that he was told of inappropriate conduct by Sandusky and after doing the minimum required kept silent despite knowing that Sandusky was around children. Again, legally he did everything needed and IMNSHO he should probably have been allowed to retire quietly at the end of the season. Morally, even he has admitted that he should have done more.
That sounds so … familiar. It’s almost like someone tried to explain this to **Starv **on like page 2 or 3. Or maybe page 4 or 5. Or pages 6 through 40.
Under current Pennsylvania law, mandatory reporters are only required to report suspected abuse to a supervisor. The law is being changed such that mandatory reporters will be able to go directly to police or child welfare officials. This is intended to prevent supervisors from not reporting abuse in order to protect the abusers. Most teachers I know are happy that the law is changing, both because it will bring PA in line with most other states, and because teachers themselves will be able to do more for their students.
If he thinks he should have done more, then he donated money to Penn State. And if he donated the money, that means he was feeling guilty. And if he was feeling guilty, that means he’s concerned. And that concern just shows what a responsible and caring individual Joe Paterno is.
I didn’t think my opinion of him could rise any higher, but well, there it is. God bless you, Joe Paterno!
Your point didn’t fly over my head so much as it laid there like a dead fish. The entire premise of your rant was that Paterno, wracked with guilt and wanting to square the books before he died, made his donation for self-serving reasons, up to and including trying to shield the money from lawsuits. :rolleyes: If Paterno is in fact not dying, it undercuts the motivation you have assumed for his donation.
Morally? I don’t think so. More like in light of the harm done not only to his own career but to the university as well, he wishes in hindsight that he’d done more which would have prevented those unfortunate (and in my opinion ridiculous) consequences from happening in the first place.
I’ll offer something else too: I doubt that Paterno had - and perhaps still doesn’t - any real knowledge of what the term “child molestation” can involve. He grew up in an era when such things were talked about vaguely if at all. I don’t think he had any idea that oral or anal sex could be involved, and to the degree that heterosexual penetrative sex was involved, he probably felt that rape would have been the charge, and therefore had it separated from molestation in his mind as well. When child molestation was talked about to people of his generation, it was generally described as inappropriate touching, with the impression being that of behavior that, while squicky, was still far less serious, both in terms of actual behavior and impact on the child, than full-blown forms of intercourse would be. I think this likelihood is supported as well by the fact that McQueary was reluctant to be graphic when relating what he’d seen to Paterno. Thus it’s entirely possible that Paterno had no real idea of what accusations of molestation involved, and therefore may be feeling guilt over the fact that more serious and harmful offenses were taking place than he imagined, and he therefore finds himself wishing he had “done more” at the time to try to stop it.
I said it at the beginning of this thread and I’ll say it again: Joe Paterno is a good man, and one who has a history of caring about and contributing to the character and educational development of the students at Penn State. I think it highly unlikely that he either wouldn’t give a shit about small children being abused and the effect that such abuse would have upon them in the future or that he would suddenly develop an interest in their future once they hit college age. I believe that when it comes to Joe Paterno the default assumption should be that he is innocent of wrongdoing, with actual evidence and not mere assumption required to prove otherwise.
I think I’m even more disappointed that you’re okay with your idol being an ignorant old man who hasn’t moved on from the 1940s and who doesn’t understand words like “fondling”, “sexual intercourse” or “molestation” and who loves his university and small town more than he gives a flying fuck about kids getting raped.
The hoops you’ve jumped through to defend this man - including minimizing Sandusky’s actions to make Paterno look good - are frightening. The rationalizations, the definitions and the references to some sort of idealized good-old-days are creepy.
Paterno may have been a good man. But he failed here. He was human, and failed in a dramatic and terrible way. Stop trying to pretend he was some sort of infallible superhero.
I’m neither okay with it nor condemning of it. It is what it is. People are the product of their environment. If they grow up in a time when child molestation is rarely talked about and only in relatively benign terms when it is, you can hardly blame them for carrying that impression with them through their lives, barring experiences that educate them otherwise, which Paterno is unlikely to have had. The life of a big time college football coach is almost 24/7 football. I seriously doubt that Joe Paterno has had the exposure to daytime talk shows and the internet necessary to get a firmer grasp on the more sordid details that child molestation can involve.
I’m quite sure he understands them. But I think his understanding of child sex abuse doesn’t jibe with the notion of 6’3" middle-aged men engaging in anal sex with 10 year old boys in the school shower. And frankly I’d be dubious myself if someone came to me with a story that couldn’t seem to differentiate between “fondling” and “some form of intercourse.” Everything about that sentence virtually screams that McQueary didn’t really know what it was he saw, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Paterno, given his likely innocence in that area, was of the suspicion that McQueary had perhaps misconstrued what he had seen and that some other explanation was a possibility. Still, he reported it as he should and in full detail as it was explained to him.
There is absolutely no evidence that Joe Paterno doesn’t “give a flying fuck” about kids getting raped, nor that he prefers not to give a flying fuck about it in order to care about his university and town.
Nonsense. I’ve neither jumped through hoops nor minimized Sandusky’s actions. What I’ve done is to insist upon evidence before we assume as fact that Paterno (and Sandusky) are guilty as charged. Frankly, this country and its innocent citizens have far more to fear from the likes of Nancy Grace and you - people who are more than willing to reflexively assert and convince yourselves of guilt based on nothing more than supposition and imaginings - than they do from me. By a long shot!
You mean facts vs. hysterical assumptions of guilt based on zero evidence? Guilty as charged.
One doesn’t have to be a superhero to have done nothing wrong, and he doesn’t have to be a superhero to live a life of integrity and lofty values. I do think however that the integrity and character he has shown throughout his life ought to dissuade people from hysterically jumping to unfounded assumptions as to his guilt in this or any other issue…barring factual evidence to the contrary, of course, of which so far there has been exactly none.
The irony is that the more this gets hashed out, the more I think he is downright evil. Initially, I just thought Paterno fucked up big time when he failed to step up for little boys being abused. But now I think he is an amoral doofus who should be prosecuted right along with all of his shameless, unethical cohorts. I hope the victims sue him for everything he’s got.
So-let me get this straight. Paterno is so obsessed with football 24/7 and is isolated enough from any form of news or information that he does not realize that it is wrong for an adult male and an unrelated child to be naked in contact in a shower. This is probably not someone I would want coaching college students. How can he possibly relate to them, being as unfamiliar as he must be with the internet or any aspect of modern society. He should have been fired years ago.
cite?
How has he shown integrity or character?
He insisted that student athletes who misbehaved get special treatment.
Good Christ, you’ve said “Nancy Grace” in this thread so many times we might as well do a shot every time you say it.
In fact, I propose the “Starving Artist Drinking Game”. Who’s with me?
It’s a Penn State scandal - what Sandusky did is a crime, but not necessarily scandalous. Had he been stopped as soon as someone found out even the smallest part of what he was doing, that would reflect well on Penn State (or really, not reflect at all other than as a location involved in the story) and it would not be particularly scandalous.
The scandal is the decisions made by Penn State employees - McQueary, Paterno, Curley, Schultz - that resulted in years going by before Sandusky had to face any consequences for his crimes. It is Penn State’s own employees - high-profile ones, at that - that created the scandal. Had they been more ethical, no one would be criticizing them.
Until it’s proven in a court of law, they are just allegations. I know, I know, it seems like a weaselly way to describe it, but technically it’s correct.
