Nobody here is making that claim.
Actually, that is exactly what Cutlass said. That quote was taken directly from his post.
The claim is that there is an institutional mindset to cover up and prevent criminal prosecution of an employee who was known to be a child rapist.
Where's the impasse?
That there is an institutional mindset to cover up and prevent criminal prosecution of an employee who was known to be a child rapist.
To begin with, the 1998 case was not a "known-to-be", as detectives and at least one judge were aware of the accusations and chose to do nothing. So, there were accusations, not "known-to-be's". So-called Penn State Police are not just rent-a-cops. They are essentially a municipal police department, with the same authority as any other cop. They are not answerable to the PSU administration. They DID NOTHING.
In the second place, the conduct of three administration officials out of hundreds does not qualify as an institutional action. An institutional action is a matter of policy. The Penn State policy is explicitly clear, in this matter. Post-1998 cases should have been referred to law enforcement and child protective services. The four primary individuals involved in this case chose not to carry out policy. ANYONE can do that. Punishing the whole university won't change policy, because the policy is right and it won't change the fact that people can ignore policy. What you need to do is punish people who ignore policy. None of these people are employed by Penn State, anymore.
Don't you agree that this is inexcusable?
If it were true.
If this weren't about the head of the department in charge of a game involved with throwing balls at 'one the leading US research institutions' rather than a religious sleep-away camp would you feel the same way? I strongly doubt it.
In the case of the Catholic Church, it was institutional policy to cover up and prevent criminal prosecution of an employee who was known to be a child rapist.
In the case of a theoretical religious organization; It would depend on whether it was actually institutional policy or not. If, for instance, it was the Vatican's policy that child rapists be reported to law enforcement, immediately, and the Pope and two Cardinals protected a Bishop that raped children, then I would expect them to be fired and prosecuted. I wouldn't go after the entire church, because it is clearly not institutional policy to cover these things up. If they didn't get rid of these people, then it becomes institutional policy, in effect, regardless of how it actually reads.
In Penn State's case, you have four high officials who broke with policy. When this was found to be true, well before the Freeh report, they were immediately fired. Currently, the university, without a court order, is forking over millions of dollars and making institutional changes to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening, again. No one is arguing, with the exception to the football program and the Paterno statue, that what the current administration is doing to address this issue is appropriate.
In the case of the football program, the only single person who knew anything about Sandusky was Joe Paterno. He is gone. None of the other senior staff employed in the program were even around when these events occurred. So, there is very little point to ending the program voluntarily. You'd be laying off people who had nothing to do with it and taking sports away from students who had nothing to do with it. Football is/was not the problem. It wasn't because of football that this cover-up happened.
In the case of the statue, there is a real issue of just how Mr. Freeh came to his conclusion about Joe Paterno. They keep talking about emails, but Paterno didn't use emails, so the administration is examining the report and the evidence to find out exactly what it was that lead Mr. Freeh to determine that Paterno did anything other than his job. Whatever the case, I suspect that statue is coming down soon, but it isn't like storming Baghdad. You can't just start tearing things down.
