Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and Jews worried about the spread of moral relativism in the United States should be encouraged by the sanctions against Penn State imposed this morning by the NCAA (which include vacating all of Joe Paterno’s victories between 1998 and 2011). Granted, Americans show no consensus on gay marriage or abortion, but with slavery and racism now child molestation also is settled. Actually, instead of being relativistic, Americans are morally rigid about most matters. Even pro-choice advocates are emphatic about the moral good of a woman’s right to choose, as well as the immorality of the pro-life position. The problem in the United States is not a lack of morality. It is that most every issue comes in either black or white. This means that a lack of moral consensus among Americans is to put it mildly, contested.
What is less clear is whether Americans are capable of distinguishing among the depravity of various vices the way, say, the Shorter Catechism talks about some transgressions of the law being more heinous in the sight of God than others. The case of Joe Paterno is proof. The overwhelming condemnation of the recently deceased coach would tempt a visitor from Mars to think that Paterno himself had molested the boys who came through Penn State’s football facility. But covering up a felony is not the same level of offense as committing a felony. Just ask Chuck Colson and Richard Nixon.
The laws of Indiana, the site of NCAA headquarters, may be instructive here (even though they played no role in Mark Emmert’s decision to punish Penn State and the reputation of Joe Paterno. Child molestation is a Class A felony in Indiana and is punishable by a sentence of a minimum of six years in prison (according to a 2000 summary). Perjury, on the other hand, is a Class D felony in Indiana and brings with it up to ten months in prison and a possible fine of $10,000. It is fairly clear that Paterno did not commit child molestation. The worst that he did was to lie before the Grand Jury, a difference between a Class A and Class D felony (it would seem to this legally challenged observer). If his offense was simply not reporting Sandusky, Indiana law classifies this as a Class B misdemeanor, which could bring a fine of $1,000 and a prison sentence of up to 180 days.
But this is all based on Indiana law, the jurisdiction where Mark Emmert and his colleagues work. According to one story from last fall, Pennsylvania has no law requiring persons to report child abuse.
What this suggests is that the NCAA is a lot harder on crime than the states themselves which have law enforcement officers with real guns and facilities with real bars and really sharp barbed wire. That may be a good thing, though I can’t imagine Emmert taking away JoePa’s wins if the coach were still alive. (The courage of the NCAA only goes so far.) But it does confirm my impression, after several viewings of The Wire, that justice mediated the state is more forgiving than justice executed outside the law. For anyone who challenged Avon or Marlo, eliminating the challenger’s existence was the only way to maintain order. But inside the agencies of the police, public school teachers, city administration, or journalism, if you violated procedures or lied to bosses, you got a reassignment, a demotion, or at worst lost your job. But unlike Barksdale’s lieutenants who cheated their boss, if you lied to the city editor of the Sunpapers about your source, you lived to see another day.
After today’s actions, the NCAA appears to exhibit a form of justice much closer to drug dealers than to civil authorities. Unfortunately for Paterno, he is not alive to see a day on his calendar that includes a visit to Emmert’s office in Indianapolis.
Old Life 
Erik,
That’s taking some pretty serious liberties. I’m not sure there’s any benefit to chasing this rabbit, but even as it regards the atomic bomb there seems to be an idea of proportionality as it regarded the Japanese ideas of honor, never surrender and Kamikaze tactics, that we felt compelled to convince them that we weren’t going to engage that type of war, we were just going to wipe them off the face of the earth if they didn’t capitulate, and at least a portion of the rationale was to preserve life on both sides, particularly ours. Now, how this has any relation to PSU is beyond my comprehension. Scorched earth practices are almost always decried both militarily and in personal relations and rarely necessary or celebrated.
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Sean – I agree with you about the reasons for dropping the bomb. After we dropped it, were we attacked by another country like Japan? After Penn State faces the penalties it is facing will another coach or administrator think it is better to cover up for another pervert molesting kids in the locker room showers vs. “embarassing the program” and going to great lengths to get the guy prosecuted and away from kids?
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Erik, I’m not sure drawing on a simpleton or God’s wrath will persuade those inclined to think or who accent God’s grace. And the take way from Hiroshima should actually be for those with power to severely limit their whacking ability, not justify scorched earth.
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Actually I think Sean was right on with his interpretation. We needed to drop the bomb because of the Bushido ethos of most of the Japanese population at that time. I just finised listening to “Unbroken” and this certainly confirmed the decision for me. Add to that the scenes in “The Pacific” on Okinawa and I’m convinced it was a rational decision. Fighting to the last man would not have been a good thing.
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Erik,
The analogy doesn’t work real well with PSU as Japan in WWII and the NCAA as the United States. As Forrest might say; ‘that dog won’t hunt.’ The bigger problem, is that the parallel Japan and United States in this conflict have already squared off and the situation has been decided by the rightful participants. The NCAA’s action is little more than ‘us too’. Plus, it smells like justification for action in a ‘target-rich’ environment. The NCAA bowed to political pressure to say/do ‘something’, and provide reason for their existence as well as try to give credence to the ‘need’ for what they do. They were protecting their ‘product'(college football) while also trying to give justification for their position, and this was ‘easy pickings’. Never mind the rampant ‘bought and paid for’ representation of big time conferences and college presidents at the NCAA and the obvious conflict of interest that engenders or turning a blind eye to the rationale of providing an ‘opportunity’ for the unqualified collegiate athlete who can’t do work beyond remedial reading, writing and ‘rithmetic’ . How about the racial overtones in the recruiting of black athletes in some place like the SEC. How about administrations who shirk their academic responsibilities as regards a student and just make sure the ‘boy’ plays on saturday. Those are all issues within the NCAA’s jurisdiction and competency-charter….supposedly. All that work is really hard and necessarily involves evaluations on their competency and success or lack thereof. That’s not so much, where they want to draw attention or justify their existence. So, they piggybacked upon the work of others, declared victory with the appropriate, tsk tsk shame on you expression, rode the wave of popular sentiment and are back busy trying to figure out the next low-hanging fruit to pick that somewhat falls within their purview but won’t bring to light their actual proficiency or lack thereof, at what they are commissioned to do.
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Erik Charter: Richard: by “acts of severe injustice” and “situation just screams of injustice” you must be referring to the plight of Sandusky’s victims? Your overblown rhetoric would make you a good liberal. I think you are the one whose sense of outrage is out of whack in this instance.
RS: No, Erik, I would not make a good liberal as that is a contradiction in terms. However, you do sound more liberal in seeming to think that Sandusky’s victims cannot get beyond what happened to them. My sense of outrage is that there is no solid or real evidence to convict Paterno on and there is no court of law and no standard of justice being used in this matter. So far you have not shown one thing that makes anyone guilty of much less a whole University or even state.
Erik Charter: Was Israel wrong to wipe out entire peoples, women & children included, when they were taking possession of the promised land? Is the NCAA’s justice not in some ways mirroring God’s justice?
RS: I know this has been answered by others, but let us remember that a perfectly just God ordered the Israelites to wipe out all those people. So it was perfect justice being carried out. The NCAA simply has no justice at all. When God ordered Israel to wipe out entire peoples, they belonged to God and as sinners deserved death. He did them no wrong at all. The NCAA cannot claim such rights on Penn State and Pennsylvania as a whole. God is a perfect judge who was present with all the crimes of the people in the lands of those that He ordered to be wiped out. The NCAA did not wait for a court of law to determine if any law had been broken but instead stepped in with a horribly unjust judgment without any real evidence. No, I don’t think that the two situations are parallel in any way.
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Sean – Those are fair points. I don’t think I can be conviced that “Penn State Football” is worthy of my defense, however. Maybe I’m just excited that for once all of America can agree on something –“Pedophilia is bad”. Well, 99.9% of America anyway. I’m sure there are some who think Sandusky’s man-boy love is just misunderstood…Give us a generation and people will be talking about those mean right-wing theocrats who needlessly persecuted Sandusky and his employer.
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Richard – How many pages of the 267 page Freeh report have you read?
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“Before 1998, several staff members and football coaches regularly observed Sandusky showering with young boys in the Lasch Building. None of the individuals interviewed by the Special Investigative Counsel notified their superiors of this behavior.” (Freeh Report, page 40). How many of you get naked in front of young boys? In front of your own children? Would you be angry if an adult male was doing this with your kids and other adults knew about it and didn’t say/do anything — for a decade?
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Erik Charter: Richard – How many pages of the 267 page Freeh report have you read?
RS: All of it minus the pages with the references.
Erik Charter: “Before 1998, several staff members and football coaches regularly observed Sandusky showering with young boys in the Lasch Building. None of the individuals interviewed by the Special Investigative Counsel notified their superiors of this behavior.” (Freeh Report, page 40). How many of you get naked in front of young boys? In front of your own children? Would you be angry if an adult male was doing this with your kids and other adults knew about it and didn’t say/do anything — for a decade?
RS: But again, does that in and of itself make it a crime? If they worked out together, it would not be totally strange to take a shower at the same time. I wouldn’t do it, but you must remember that these are showers that are made for several people to take showers at the same time. If it was a regular practice of his, perhaps people were used to it and did not think it led to sex crimes. Taking the shower was not a crime and is not a crime. You want to convict Paterno and Penn State based on odd behavior rather than criminal activity. The fact that so many people saw it sure makes it seem that he was doing this in public and not in secret. The Freeh report is clear that others were not comfortable with this, but they couldn’t do anything about it.
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The only thing we know for sure is that if this ever makes it to the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts will be good with the $60 million fine because it could be legally construed as a “tax”…
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Erik, does it trouble you at all that from one fairly Reformed angle, Mark Emmert did exactly what Freeh accused Paterno of doing? Acting out of self-interest. Joe acted to protect the program (so they say). Emmert acted to protect the NCAA.
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Erik Charter: The only thing we know for sure is that if this ever makes it to the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts will be good with the $60 million fine because it could be legally construed as a “tax”…
RS: As hard as it is to agree with a Cyclone (TIC), that was a good one. A painful reminder, but still a good one.
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D.G. – I have no doubt that Emmert is a politician who is responding to political pressure to “do something”. When Joe acted to “protect the program” young boys continued to suffer at the hands of Sandusky. I don’t see who is suffering as a result of Emmert’s actions other than Penn State.
I think the key to the whole issue (which everyone in the country seems to be debating) is, should you punish an “institution” for the acts of a few individuals? In the Penn State case it seems like the individuals involved are being dealt with. They will have their day in court and may or may not be found guilty. I would imagine Penn State as an institution will also have their day in court with the NCAA, although the powers-that-be at Penn State may decide it is politically wise to just take their lumps and move on.
When the audit team on Enron turned a blind eye to fraud the U.S. government decided to indict the whole firm and thousands of people who had nothing to do with the Enron audit lost their jobs. If a similar thing happened at another huge accounting firm the government most likely wouldn’t do it again because they need to keep at least a few large firms in business to compete against each other. Was this “fair”? – Maybe not. Did it serve a positive political purpose? Probably.
One of the criticisms those of us who favor a 2k worldview have of some of our brothers on the religious right is that they demand a level of purity in the common/political realm that we believe is not necessary to demand. I know a lot of Christians who would not vote for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama because Romney is not Ron Paul. It’s not enough for them that Romney is arguably better than Obama, They demand purity because they view their actions in the common/political realm to be as important/sacred as their role in the church/spiritual realm. They wouldn’t compromise on a decision on who to vote for any more than they would compromise on a decision of whether or not to commit adultery.
The NCAA is not a session, a consistory, a presbytery, a classis, a synod, or a general assembly. They are an imperfect political body and they act in the way a political body acts – a bit clumsily. I can live with their decision, though, because the NCAA member schools have delegated authority to them. They are protecting the NCAA, but I also think they are protecting kids because the next time kids are being abused by a coach and someone knows about it they will work harder to get the man or woman prosecuted.
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Erik, the others hurt by the decision are — let’s see — players, coaches, fans. Maybe they deserve it. Then there are business people in Happy Valley who depend on those 8 or so games each year to turn a profit. Maybe they deserve it too because they are part of the culture that has made Penn State football such a big entity that people involved in it make bad or even wicked moral decisions.
But once you bring up the culture of Penn State football, then you have stepped in the NCAA. If it weren’t for the television contracts, the bowls, the divisions, the statistics, the championships, the hoopla that the NCAA has nurtured and perpetuates, then Penn State football doesn’t have the cultural resources to turn its program into a culture that could have created the “monster” that is JoePa.
So what Emmert did was punish one institution to preserve the NCAA’s culture. This way the NCAA could look moral even though it’s own status in higher education raises a host of issues that only those with stomachs strong enough are willing to examine. (BTW, I am not pure in this. I have for too long bought the NCAA’s product. I fed the beast.)
BTW, it’s still not clear what laws anyone at Penn State, other than Sandusky, broke. In the U.S. we believe in innocence until guilt is proved. The NCAA is not the U.S. But what investigation did they conduct? Did PSU have a chance to defend itself?
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D.G. – I read these numbers in the Wall Street Journal yesterday – “In the university’s 2011-12 operating budget, football generated $50.6 million of the $97.4 million in total revenue for intercollegiate athletics. Total expenses amounted to $84.7 million, $10.4 million of which was on football.” Wow. How many companies are there where you can spend $10.4 million (including paying the head coach at least a million) and make $50.6 million? It’s enough to make a Chinese industrialist blush.
The NCAA based its action on the Freeh Report. The NCAA sanctions could probably be viewed as an opening offer, which could be whittled down should Penn State appeal. Penn State will evaluate an appeal politically more than they will economically.
I would conclude by saying there is room in the toolbox for blunt instruments & fine tooth combs. The NCAA is more akin to the Executive Branch or Congress – blunt instruments. The courts, where this may ultimately be decided – are the fine tooth comb.
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A take at the Powerline Blog that I’m inclined to agree with concerning Freeh’s report as it relates to Paterno:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/the-case-against-joe-paterno-part-two.php
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I went to the site that Jack Miller gave just above and I found another one as well. It think this one is devasting. For those who want only lawyers to speak on this, the guy who wrote this is a lawyer.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/the-case-against-joe-paterno-weak-to-non-existent-on-the-current-record.php
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In any case, NCAA>RCC.
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The NCAA’s treasury of victories is 112 victories lighter.
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