Sandusky's World

The Penn State scandal is unbelievable. It is a multidimensional nexus that highlights the worst of our society and some of the hardest things about being human.

At the core of it is one hardcore pedophile, Jerry Sandusky. He likes to molest prepubescent boys. He doesn't just like to molest boys, he is obsessed with it. He has arranged his entire life so that he is around young boys in situations that justify physical contact and nudity. He didn't only arrange his life, he arranged the entire society of the Penn State community and beyond to bring boys to him and to cover up for him. He set himself up as a hero, surrounded himself with heroic figures in the community, they made his excuses and kept the cops off his tail while the people of the university and the state -- students, faculty and staff, alumni, fans -- considered him a symbol of everything that is good.

One thing that blows you away with the Jerry Sandusky story is the extent to which he arranged to create a world around himself that aggrandized him while providing him access to victims. He established an organization for disadvantaged children and often took boys that he met through the organization to sporting events with him, set up a special bedroom for them in his home. He adopted six children. He lived next door to an elementary school and surrounded himself with children. As a Penn State coach he was venerated in the community; it seems crazy that there would be student riots protesting the arrest of a long-term child molester and the firing of the group of men who protected him, but the way Sandusky lived out his dark fantasy brought him widespread respect and admiration, people loved him and his ring of co-conspirators.

This blog formed in response to attacks on our suburban county's new sex ed curriculum seven years ago. In particular there were radical elements who wanted to exclude factual information about sexual orientation, and so we have a history here of reporting on and discussing LGBT issues. I am a straight blogger and do not pretend to speak for gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people. Our interest is in finding a way that we can all live happily together, accepting and even appreciating the differences between us.

That being said, I want to make a point very clear here. Jerry Sandusky is not gay. He is a straight man who has a sexual obsession with young boys. Gay people do not do what he did, he did not do what he did because he is secretly gay. He has sexual desires that are not all right to act on, and he acts on those desires in nonconsensual ways that are not all right. If a gay person molests a child they are prosecuted when they are caught, just like anybody, and that happens sometimes but it is not very common. This isn't about sexual orientation, it is about raping children.

If the focal story is about Jerry Sandusky the person and the creative ways he found to satisfy his bizarre cravings, the next-larger circle of the story has to do with the way the athletic department and university community allowed this to happen. At least two different adults walked in on Sandusky having sex with children and told their supervisors but did not call the police. One was a janitor, new to the job, he was freaked out after he saw Sandusky performing oral sex on a child -- he told his boss, who thought he was in danger of having a heart attack -- but he was afraid of losing his job if he involved the police. The other witness was a graduate assistant, now a coach, who walked into the shower room and saw Sandusky anally raping a child of approximately ten years of age, and left. Called his father. He later told his superiors on the coaching staff what he'd seen and there were meetings with the university president and others, they are trying to fudge the story but it doesn't matter, even if you thought a coach was "fondling" a kid that age you would report it to the police and get rid of him. Instead they circled the wagons and protected this monster.

The larger story has to do with the manipulation of public opinion.

Go to the Second Mile Foundation web site. This is the organization founded by Jerry Sandusky, they help children and when Sandusky saw one he liked he helped himself. The site opens with a Flash graphic that displays these words on the screen, one after the other:

• Ongoing commitment
  
• Responsibility
  
• Volunteer driven
  
• Opportunity
  
• Character
  
• Potential
  
• Positive
  
• Positive self-image
  
• Positive contact
  
• Positive interaction
  
• The Second Mile; providing children with help and hope

This is the organization that Jerry Sandusky created to recruit children for sex.

There is an issue here, having to do with the appearance of morality. All the things in that list are good things. Children need opportunities, they need to develop a positive self-image. You cannot be against anything on that list. Help and hope are good, all these things are good.

It is like the liar who says "I am telling the truth." Truth-tellers also say "I am telling the truth," and because you don't know which kind of person you are dealing with, the statement is meaningless. The sentence "I am telling the truth" has no meaning, because a liar will say it as readily as someone who is truthful and there is no way to tell one from the other. You could take the statement at face value, you could say it means that the person speaking is telling the truth but you would be a fool.

In the same way, to say you are in favor of responsibility and positive interaction and giving children help and hope is meaningless. Everybody is in favor of giving children help and hope, attributing those motives to yourself does not mean you are more fervent about it than other people. In reality the best way to show you favor giving children help and hope is to actually give them help and hope. Do something for them, set an example, pave the way for a child with potential, be nice to a kid, there are lots of ways to help children. Sandusky set up an organization that advertised good motives, and sadly the people who actually work for the Second Mile Foundation seem to be good-hearted people who are trying to help children. But for Sandusky it was a front, a cover, a way for him to recruit boys for his own perverse use.

Of course it is not so simple, it doesn't make sense to automatically challenge people who say good things. It is necessary for people to articulate good principles. We need to remember sometimes, consciously, that it is important to help those who are disadvantaged, that we need to forgive those who have offended us, we need to say out loud that people who are different from us are people, too, just like us, and deserve our respect. There is really nothing wrong with saying good things. But it is not enough, and sadly it is possible to say good things and behave badly. And here's a hard concept: it is possible for good people to do bad things. Those who enabled Sandusky's immorality behaved badly, even though they were successful and even virtuous in other things. And sometimes there are bad people: Sandusky. Where do you draw the line and judge people rather than their actions? You can't punish an action, you punish the person, there is no way to distinguish a person from their behavior. Every judgment of a behavior is a judgment of the person who chose that behavior.

One last thing -- the Second Mile is a big organization and I am heartsick for those people who signed up and really did good things and have seen their good intentions misappropriated. The organization has a statement on their web site, by the way, explaining that they have not let Sandusky near the children since 2008. Jerry Sandusky's legacy will leave a bitter taste for many years to come.