Drink heavily for decades, acquire alcohol-induced dementia, and then try to perform common everyday tasks like thinking and reasoning?
More of a commitment than beer pong, but I guess I’m game…
It’s mostly a legal way to cover their asses, lest they get sued for libel/slander.
Extensive yet remarkably uninformative interview with Paterno in the Washington Post. There are only two items which are kind of eyebrow raising, IMO.
He claims that he had far less influence at Penn State than most people think. Also, he claims he never even heard of… I’m not sure what exactly. Possibly pedophilia, or male homosexual rape, or… rape. This is the quote:
Basically, he comes across as a doddering confused old man, something akin to Ronald Reagan later in his presidency. Maybe he was. Or maybe he’s just rationalizing it after the fact. Pretty much impossible to tell from this story.
In counterpoint, here’s a NYT op-ed from last November, detailing the various Catholic church sex scandals which where already in the news by 2002, the time of the McQuery incident. One of those scandals included Paterno’s home dioceses of Altoona.
It’s one thing to claim that Paterno grew up in an age when people didn’t talk about sex abuse. It’s another thing entirely to believe his claim that he, a grown man, in 2002, couldn’t even understand the possibilities of what was happening.
Here’s the link -
That was my thought as well. I had read somewhere that he was a devout Catholic, and I thought, “Did the whole Catholic sex abuse thing never catch his attention?” But I wasn’t clear on the timeline of the two things, so thanks for the link.
Paterno isn’t doddering at all. He, like most in his and previous generations, is simply ignorant of salacious details and behaviors when it comes to sex. It’s not like once knew about it in his younger days and forgot it in his dotage. He’s simply never been exposed to it and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Further, I’d wager that a great many devout Catholics have no idea of the lurid details and specific offenses involved in the Catholic church scandals. You don’t really think Catholic congregations have been regaled with descriptions of oral and anal boy/man sex during Sunday morning services, do you?
Here’s my take on this from personal experience of family, friends and associates:
Apparently, for a lot of elderly Catholic men the sex abuse scandal was lost on them. The way they were raised demanded “devotion”. But this devotion had little to do with spiritual awareness and fulfillment. It had to do with following the rules. Follow the rules, i.e., go to mass on Sunday, don’t eat meat on Friday, go to confession, take communion, fast during Lent, go to mass on holy days, donate to the church and, most importantly, don’t question the church authorities. The Pope, bishops, priests and nuns were not to be questioned. Many of the religious authorities established personality cults which insulated them.
When the scandals broke many of these older guy followers went into denial. They were looking towards the Pearly Gates and they didn’t want their blind faith called into question. They really felt that they were going to be judged on how well they followed the rules, not their spirituality.
So yes, it would not surprise me if JoePa didn’t learn anything from the sex abuse scandal. He acted like a Catholic bishop of the time. Pass it on and forget it. The victim had no standing if the reputation of the organization was at stake. That certainly doesn’t absolve him of anything but it does help to explain abhorrent action (or inaction) that at least borders on the criminal.
:dubious:You might have a point if it weren’t for the fact that Paterno did EXACTLY what he was supposed to do according to both the law and established practice. He didn’t try at all to dissuade McQueary from reporting what he saw, and he reported what McQueary told him immediately and accurately. It was not his job to do more. He had neither the training nor legal standing to do more, thus to claim that by not doing more his actions border on criminal is nonsense.
Once again, dumbass: what about his MORAL DUTY???
Yes, because the current generation invented sex.
QUIT MAKING MORONIC EXCUSES UP. You’re only making yourself look even stupider.
I explained to you before why you have no business using a word like “standing” (which you don’t understand) nor for pretending that some special “training [or] legal standing” is required to call the police or to ask a former employee point blank if he was in fact sexing a ten year old up in a shower, and follow-up on any denial, and be morally required to do so. You blew it off like Sandusky with a ten year old, 'cause there’s nothing you could say to refute it, but it’s still the case that your “point” is one of a moron.
I think there’s a lot of generalizations right there. First, Paterno is (now) 84, not 124.
John Gacy was not a priest, but he was an early example of a seemingly-respectable “normal Catholic guy” and quasi-community-leader (he was an active Jaycee, community volunteer, and creepily enough in view of the access-to-children themes you see with pedophiles, an enthusiastic volunteer (as a clown) for children’s events). He was exposed in 1979, when Paterno would have been about 52, hardly an elderly man. Besides Ted Bundy, he was one of the most exhaustively-covered rapist-murderers of the 1970s, and the details of his sexual predation on teenage boys who came under his sway were exhaustively detailed.
Father Bruce Ritter would be a household name to many mainstream Catholics. I know plenty of 80 year old faithful Catholic guys who would have vivid memories of his scandal. His “charity” (Covenant House) was one that you would get mailings for, or maybe see publicized in your Parish bulletin with details on how to donate, all through the '70s and '80s if you found yourself on any active Catholic mailing list. He was highlighted as doing the Lord’s work with his “ministry to street kids” in New York and elsewhere (eerily similar to Shanley, not so different from Sandusky).
He was exposed as a serial same-sex predator on his underage charges by 1990. It was all over the MSM and caused a lot of soul-searching in the Catholic world given the role that the Catholic media and Parishes had played in steering money to his empire without any scrutiny of why he had so many stories in his newsletters that dwelt in loving detail with detailed accounts of how strapping young blond Midwestern boys got sucked into the seedy rentboy world in Times Square. It’s not as though the Catholic Church tells or told its members in the 1990s not to read the MSM, or as though the burghers in the Parish wouldn’t be horrified to learn that they’d been conned into enabling a “pervert” or “pederast” (and, oh yes, those are certainly worda that today’s 80 year old Catholic men most certainly knew how to use to apply to a man who liked other men or boys, going way back beyond 1990). Hell, you need only to read an Aubrey-Maturin novel to know that, as of 230 years ago, devout Cathlics knew exactly what was involved in “pederasty” (hint: it’s in the Old Testament, which has never exactly been occult or rarefied knowledge).
It’s bullshit, pure and simple, for anyone (including Paterno, in his v. 3.0 attempt at making himself look good, with a friendly reporter, after two months of PR consultant intensive training), to pretend that the concept of an old man diddling a boy (or a “respectable” old man doing so, or an “authority figure” doing so), was some unknowable concept. Illiterate Hebrew peasants were expected to understand what it meant when their rabbi told them that “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them,” and they did. The fine details of the power relationships (Hint: Paterno/Sandusky/McQueary) that enable pedophiles may not have been widely publicized till the 1990s, but they were by then, and Paterno had had at least a decade to figure those out in a world in which he was allowing vulnerable children to be hosted and abused on his premises.
I blew past because it was nonsense. But since it seems that you are going to keep taking a stand (heh) on this incorrect definition of “standing” just like you did with “fondling,” I guess I’m going to have to give you another vocabulary lesson like I did with fondling. To wit, from M-W Online:
Main Entry: 2standing
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
1 a : a place to stand in : location b : a position from which one may assert or enforce legal rights and duties
2 a : length of service or experience especially as determining rank, pay, or privilege b : position or condition in society or in a profession; especially : good reputation <a member in good standing> c : position relative to a standard of achievement or to achievements of competitors; also plural : a listing of the standings of individuals or teams (as in a league)
3 : maintenance of position or condition : duration <a custom of long standing>
Notice first of all that there are many definitions of “standing” apart from the one you’ve foolishly seized upon. Then notice definition 1. b., which is the one that applies to Joe Paterno, as Joe Paterno had no position from which to assert or enforce legal rights and duties that would allow him to investigate Sandusky on his own or to call the shots as to how Penn State’s administration conducted its investigation. Thus it may properly be said that he had no standing to do so. Again, you really need to stop trying to rely upon vocabulary definitions to make your point because you’re embarrasingly bad at it.
You fucking retard. Every single adult human being has the “position to enforce the legal right and duty” of every human civilian adult human being morally to make a truthful police report or truthfully confront a credibly-accused criminal.
Don’t believe me? Cite me the statute or case-law in which someone was criminally or civally penalized for doing so.
Moron.
It’s just a dodge. Nobody needs any kind of “standing” to call the police and report something unusual going on in the showers between a naked man and a child.
Paterno didn’t need to investigate. He didn’t need to judge the severity of the crime. He didn’t need to confront Sandusky. He didn’t need a legal permission slip giving him “standing”. He just need to hand the matter over to the right people. Instead, he kicked it upstairs and then turned a blind eye while Sandusky continued to trot a parade of little boys around the facility. Cause, you know, integrity.
This is a perfect summary of the situation. Not that, of course, certain people will recognize it as such.
I’ve followed the discussion for days since I stopped participating, and nothing really has changed. The same pedophilia apologists or Paterno excusers are engaged in the same distortions of the truth. It has definitely illustrated for me something I’ve always known intellectually, and sometimes experienced first hand: that men of power will always be able to gather worshipers and sycophants to defend them so that they never have to speak in defense of themselves.
I’d be careful about calling people morons if I were you, given the fact that I never said Paterno didn’t have standing to call the police. So, it’s a twofer of moronity for you: a) you’ve clearly shown that you don’t know what “standing” means; and b) you can’t follow conversations even when they play out in black and white before your very eyes.
Apart from that, I must say that in reading the article Snowboader Bo linked to a few posts upthread that Penn State’s board of regents is beginning to come under fire for caving in to the nabobs of hysteria and firing Joe Paterno so hastily and without due process.
Due process? Paterno was a college football head coach. Perhaps you notice that coaching changes happen with some frequency, and due process doesn’t apply.
Paterno shouldn’t be special in this regard, right? That would weaken the influence colleges have over coaches, and you surely don’t want that.
“He, like most in his and previous generations” - NO.
I work with the elderly & have for decades. The Penn State/Paterno scandal, the Catholic Church Pedophile scandals and various others are not foreign teritory to people from older generations. All of these subjects have been discussed with & around me over the years. These things may not have been openly discussed in earlier days but people were certainly aware of those kinds of behavior reaching back to their youths and refer to them. Of course there are always those who choose not to hear or understand subjects that are uncomfortable or unpleasant for them or choose not to believe to protect an institution or individual. Of any generation (see yourself). That does not give any generation a free pass on ethical behavior.
Yeah, probably.
You really are a troll. There is not a living American adult who when told that someone was troubled because he saw an adult “fondling” a child would think of some Ye Olde 15th Century definition that meant patting on the head or hugging. You’re a fucking self-evident retard, troll, and pedophile enabler, as everyone here has had the sense to tell me. EVERY SINGLE LIVING American English speaker would hear “fondling” (ESPECIALLY in conjunction with “sexual contact”) as meaning “sexually touching.” Because you are a troll, you can pretend otherwise (by the way, this is the best case assumption), but you proved nothing about vocabulary to me with your retarded disquisition on “non-sexual fondling.”