Wisdom Quarterly RussiaToday (Courtesy of Derek Himes) You will NOT fire our winning coaches even if they molest boys in the locker room. They're winning football games! Today (Nov. 9, 2011) police in riot gear -- bored from plotting against peaceful Occupy Movement demonstrators -- confronted hundreds of Penn State jocks and football fans who took to the streets after the ouster of child-molestation-ignoring coach Joe Paterno.
Accused child rapist Coach Sundusky, founder of Second Mile
Crowds toppled a television news van. The sports lovers flooded downtown State College after Paterno and university President Graham Spanier were fired amid a growing furor linked to their handling of homosexual child molestation and rape allegations against manly former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.
Silent all these yearsWisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
Is it any wonder Catholic priests, scout leaders, and coaches regularly sodomize children, get drunk, and watch porn? It seems our entire society is swept over by child molesting.
Macho football coaches molest boys in locker room showers, tough police assault detainees, hypermasculine soldiers homosexually rape fellow soldiers, officers condone gang rape and belittling victims, brutal prison inmates regularly engage in sex with men, fathers have gay sex with children. It just seems that for such a heterosexual Christian nation, we sure are hypocritical.
There is a taboo in most societies against molesting children.
Only the taboo is not against the molestation itself.
It is against talking about it, especially by victims.
We w ill not stand for it!
We say there's nothing wrong with choosing to be gay -- while the dominant religions of our culture absolutely condemn it. Yet we secretly and shamefully exploit the vulnerable and take out homosexual impulses on them, which we must have inherited from being molested ourselves. And nearly no one stops the insidious circle of abuse.
One dare not speak its name! And when priests are caught (not rogue "soldiers for the lord" but average, commonplace clerics condoned by the Church in over 200 Christian sects and non-Christian institutions as well), we go deaf, dumb, and blind -- in effect
condoning it ourselves, even when it is our kids, our fathers, our soldiers, our coaches.
Then we cry and say God will take care of it, so what is there for us to do if He's handling it? No problem here. That only happens in
other countries like
Afghanistan and
Iran or anywhere are "enemies" are.
Those who do not work it out act it out.
NOTE: What does this issue have to do with Buddhism? Lots. First of all, there is the issue of sexual misconduct (kamesu micchacara), which at its most fundamental level means having intercourse with those dependent on others for protection and support. Children, unable to consent, are in a sense being raped. We, being interdependent, are all being hurt. There is also the issue of causing harm to society beyond the victims and their loved ones. There is the issue of retaliating, which is said to be worse than attacking. Say, just for the sake of argument, that Sandusky was the victim of childhood sexual abuse and that this gave him a penchant to turn around and do the same thing. By doing, he becomes worse than his perpetrators. We all do. If we regard as wrong what was done to us, we certainly do not want to do that to someone and then bring it upon ourselves in the future again (by the strange and mind boggling operation of karma). There is the issue of hypocrisy, of sports and money being more important to a school than academics and science. This issue is a lot bigger than Penn State or football.
This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor. On Nov. 12, 1991, Indonesian troops fired on a peaceful memorial procession in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 270 East Timorese. Two decades later, Amnesty International has called for a judicial inquiry into the massacre, noting that the failure "to hold all the perpetrators to account highlights a wider problem of impunity for crimes 
under international law and other human rights violations committed during the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste (then East Timor) between 1975 and 1999." We play an excerpt from the 1992 documentary "Massacre: The Story of East Timor" produced by journalist Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman on dictator Suharto's Bush and US-backed crimes. More
