I wasn’t ready for the intensity of ridicule from the comments in a class that I teach dealing with reading skills and strategies at a community college in upstate New York! The class was working on making inferences from a sociology article about sex and gender when the issue of homosexuality was raised by a student. I thought for a moment, given the meanness of responses from five of the students in a class of 20, that the class had been transported in a time warp back to the 1950s!
The outrageousness of the homophobic remarks from these particular students prompted me to spend 5 minutes at the beginning of the next class to talk about the importance of free and open discussion as the primary hallmark of how a college classroom operates. I was amazed that even after this brief discussion of the importance of open debate in the college environment that the same offending students continued to snicker at their seats.
I recalled an incident 20 years earlier during a monthly supervisory counseling session among leaders of domestic violence groups run at the agency at which I worked. The point of the monthly sessions was literally to check up on how leaders of groups were doing personally dealing with those adjudicated by the courts into the group counseling program run by this agency. One of the members of a group I was co-leading at the time had made an outrageously homophobic comment in the course of a particular group a few weeks before the supervisory session. The group leader of the supervisory session, a social worker, made the accurate comment that homophobia was the last bastion of hate in the US. (Of course, this was prior to the events of September 11, 2001 that unleashed another kind of intolerance.)
Fast forward to the events at Penn State over the past week involving allegations of child rape by former football coach Jerry Sandusky. The scene of masses of students coalescing in support of Sandusky’s former boss and head football coach Joe Paterno were sickening! One has to wonder what’s being taught at Penn State and how a student comes to approve (even by proxy) of someone who knew that grotesque sexual acts were being committed against children and refused to report the alleged crime to the police. What kind of mindset does a student have to have to go out and support that kind of obscenity?
It seems that there are places that are far, far removed from the youthful idealism of the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zuccotti Park, both in real and moral space and time!
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He blogs at howielisnoff.wordpress.com.
The obvious intelligence of your column in in tension with your rush to judgement in the Sandusky case.
You rail against intolerance. But that is precisely what drives the Sandusky case. The hallmark of intolerance is the refusal to ask questions.
In the Sandusky case a key question is what did McQuery see. At keast one grand jury witness reports he heard slapping sounds and saw a boy’s head pop out. Later he saw Sandusky exit the shower wearing a towel. That hardly qualifies as witnessing a rape. It is consistent with that but clearly what happened is unclear since McQuery -according to the witness did not claim to see anything.
If one inserts the actual observation for the “thick description” provided by the media “he saw a rape” the story makes more sense. Why would McQuery continue to attend events with Sandusky, why would he not himself have called the police which he did not.
Another question is why was Paterno dismissed. To answer this question one must ask what was actually reported to him. Did McQuery report seeing a rape or did he report “hearing slapping sounds.”
If you are going to be true to your principles have the courage of your convictions. Do not fall into the culture of instant justice.