The Ugly Truth-- Child Molesters

Today's NY Times poses an obvious question by Euripidean scholar Daniel Mendelsohn: "What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?" Before reading it, keep in mind that Coach Sandusky-- like most child predators-- was very much "straight," a seemingly "normal" married man with children. When I heard how Sandusky was using his charity as a lending library to get underage children into his clutches, it reminded me of extreme right-wing Republican leader Spokane Mayor Jim West, who did very much the same thing. West was a GOP heavyweight in Washington state, a loudmouthed Republican pol who, to a great extent, actually made his career based on his vicious homophobia... before being caught molesting young boys in a case that sounds entirely like Sandusky's. He made a big deal about getting married, proposing to his wife from the floor of the Washington state Senate. I wrote this in 2005, a year before he died:

Jim West is currently the Mayor of Spokane. But for 25 years West has used his positions of authority-- as a sheriff's deputy, Boy Scout leader and powerful politician-– to lure young boys into his web. It looks like West was one of the typical Republican closet cases who desperately tried to show the world how aggressively homophobic he was to try to prove he wasn't gay. West wasn't just another two-bit Republican pol; he was the Washington State Senate leader and one of the most powerful GOP leaders in the Northwest. So how homophobic was West (while he was molesting underage boys)? Early in 1986, West introduced a bill to bar gays and lesbians from working in schools, daycare centers and some state agencies. The bill called for firing state workers whose sexual identities became known. That same year he voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. Needless to say he vigorously opposed every gay rights bill that ever came up and, of course voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2003, as Senate majority leader, he bottled up a gay rights bill in committee, where it died. Once he became Mayor of Spokane he opposed giving benefits to domestic partners of City Hall workers but was beaten with a veto-proof majority on the City Council. Jim West is a sick cookie, a sick Republican cookie.

Yesterday the FBI raided his home and confiscated his computer and other records as part of an on-going Federal Investigation into corruption allegations. West has been using his office to offer City Hall jobs to young men he met in gay online chat rooms. The FBI obtained the federal warrant to search West's home after convincing a federal judge there was probable cause to believe a federal crime had been committed. The warrant said there was sufficient evidence to believe that West "knowingly and willingly engaged in a scheme to entice others to engage in sexual activity with him through offers and grants of city of Spokane jobs, internships or appointments." West's secret life started unraveling in May when a local newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, started publishing the details of a thorough investigation into the Republican politician's double-life. His well-documented crimes against young boys go back into the 1970's when he was a deputy sheriff and a Boy Scout leader. West, who is clearly delusional, refuses to resign and is fighting a recall drive, does acknowledge using "poor judgment," but denies doing anything illegal. Nothing illegal? Does this sound legal to you? West and the members of the Pac NW Pedophile clan have been accused of using an at risk boys camp, Morning Star Boys Ranch, of which West is on the Board of Directors, as a kind of library to check out young boys for camping trips and hiking. It is alleged that during these trips the clan molested the young men. West, who resigned last week from the boys ranch Board of Directors, admits he "vaguely remembers" that he "maybe took one kid on a hike or camping trip once."

West, typical of the kind of cornered-rat-Republican on getting caught, is playing as if HE is the victim. After strenuously denying everything, he's now starting to crack and this horribly vicious, hate-filled homophobe who has used a career in public office to try to destroy the lives of innocent gay men and women, now tries to say he is being attacked because he is gay! "I'm being destroyed because I am a gay man, which is fine," this vicious right-wing child-molester/blowhard whined. Recently West lashed out against "sex Nazis" who try to regulate private sexual behavior, so deluded that he fails to recognize that he built his whole career on exactly that! "Because I am a gay man, because of this double life, it has been hell." My heart is not breaking for Jim West as more and more of his victims are coming forth to testify against his deprecations. By the time Bush and the Republicans are swept out of government we're going to have to build a new super-prison just to house the Republican politicians caught up in a culture of arrogant corruption and abuse of power beyond anything ever seen in this country before.

At the end of his life he was shunned by his Republican colleagues, as much because they thought he was "gay" as because he was raping defenseless children. The answer to Mendelsohn's question in today's Times reveals a similar "ugly truth," one, he points out, that goes "stubbornly undiscussed."

Whichever version of Mike McQueary’s story you choose to believe-- his grand jury testimony, in which a “distraught” Mr. McQueary, then a graduate assistant to the football team, “left immediately” after witnessing the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky sodomize a young boy, or the e-mail recently leaked to the press, in which he wrote, “I did stop it, not physically ... but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room”-- the mind recoils at the grotesque failure to intervene more forcefully. How could a grown man have left the scene without taking the child with him? Mr. McQueary wants us to imagine that his brain was racing during those “30 to 45 seconds,” that he “had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” But it seems clear he wasn’t thinking at all-- and it’s hard not to wonder why.

I think it was the gender of the victim.

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).

Mr. McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.

Mr. McQueary’s refusal to process the scene he described-- his coach having sex with another male-- was reflected in the reaction of the university itself, which can only be called denial. You see this in the squeamish treatment of the assaults as a series of inscrutable peccadilloes best discussed-- and indulged-- behind closed doors. (Penn State’s athletic director subsequently characterized Mr. Sandusky’s alleged act as “horsing around,” a term you suspect he would not have used to describe the rape of a 10-year-old girl.) Denial is there in the treatment of the victims as somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be rescued. For Penn State officials, disgust at the perceived gay element seems to have outweighed the horror of the crimes themselves. (“Perceived,” because psychologists generally deny that pedophiles possess adult sexuality-- something that can be described as “gay” or “straight” in the first place.)

The denial is hardly surprising. In a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment. Anecdotal and public evidence for this is dismayingly overwhelming. Most recently, Sean Avery, of the New York Rangers hockey team, has been ostracized and ridiculed merely for making a short video in support of New York’s same-sex marriage act. (Anti-gay slurs are such an ingrained part of Ranger fans’ cheering that some gay fans have stopped attending games.)

What lurks behind so many male athletes’ vociferous antipathy to homosexuality seems to be deep anxiety about masculinity, the very quality that aggressive team sports showcase. After all, a guy is never so much a guy as when he’s playing a violent game or hanging with his teammates afterward in the showers and locker rooms, “horsing around.” The familiar ferocious anti-gay swagger many athletes affect is likely meant to quash even the faintest suspicion that anything tender or erotic animates naked playfulness between men.

But true masculinity, like true sportsmanship, contains other virtues, too: forthrightness, honesty, fair play, courage in difficult situations, readiness to acknowledge error, concern for the weak as well as admiration for the strong. In their handling of Mr. Sandusky, the leaders of Penn State’s legendary football program failed to display a single one of these qualities. Maybe it’s time for a new kind of sports hero. What else are we supposed to conclude when grown men, trained to brave 300-pound linemen, run away from boys in trouble?

UPDATE: Dale Kildee

Child sex abuse always seems to come from Republicans. But retiring Michigan Congressman Dale Kildee (D) has been accused by distant relatives of sexually abusing an underage male relative, a second cousin, over 50 years ago. He denies the allegations, and the drama promises to play out big-time this week. The charges against Kildee look insane and don't pass any smell tests.