11.13.2011 11:23 AM

Shorter David Warren

“I side with the pedophilia-enablers, because they look normal.”

21 Comments

  1. pomojen says:

    Had this person for whom the Penn State students rioted turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of a child in this country, he would have been prosecuted for failure to report, failure to protect. That’s not being pointy headed or intellectual.

    A ten year old boy. Imagine it for a moment. Can’t do it? Exactly. The man is a criminal coward.

    • Jan says:

      Turns out there is an obligation to report – called the Clery Act. As a recipient of federal funding Penn was obligated to report any crime, including accusations.

  2. Torgo says:

    I couldn’t post a comment at the Ottawa Citizen about this, so I’ll just say it here.

    After reading that article, I am both sick and baffled. I don’t completely understand exactly what David Warren is trying to say, and, given the subject matter and some of the bizarre justifications he drops in the article, I don’t want to understand it completely.

    I only hope he never has any children that are victimized by ‘institutional failures’ and ‘not necessarily morally contemptible inaction’.

    I’d also be insulted if I was an American reading this article, since defending pedophiles is apparently ‘typically American’.

    I’m sorry, but I’m still shaking my head, going WTF? I’d rather be political correct than cover up child sexual abuse. Again, WTF?

  3. Mike Adamson says:

    I know it’s David Warren but….wow!

  4. Michael S says:

    Must suck to share a name with that fascist.

  5. ed says:

    It’s pretty obvious that he is trying to obfuscate the point of his article here in order to justify what Paterno did (or didn’t do, as it were). I am also keenly aware that he did not mention the candlelight vigil for the victims held at PSU on Friday night, or the moment of silence before yesterdays game. I’d write more but the more I think about the point he was trying to make, the more I slip into an incoherent rage.

  6. Glen says:

    Easily his worst column ever.

  7. TheSilentObserver says:

    Financial reform…boo! Kiddie rape…err OK? Intellectuals…boo! College football…YEEHAW!

  8. Reality Bites says:

    If I remember correctly (and I do) David Warren thinks allowing same-sex marriage was “a terrible and unthinking act of barbarism.”

    I’ve never understood the mindset of those who think two adults marrying is horrible, but raping children and covering it up is just fine.

    I do know what the face of evil is though – and it’s not two guys getting married.

  9. patrick deberg says:

    It’s very simple to understand what this Ratbag is trying to say. I don’t know why Gord is trying to say it’s a muddy column. It is clear if you give it a read. Dave would continue to shift the pedophiles around the country or world, continue to allow 10 year olds to be sodomized as long as it was kept quiet and not allowed to shame whatever old boys network, club, church he was a part of. The rest of it is a smokescreen. I have read a great many of this Ratbags musings and don’t care much where he goes cause he’s a complete right wing basket case. He has in the past represented himself as some kind of defender of the faith as if the Catholic faith needs this fruitcake to speak for it. I’d excommunicate this pilgrim just to save whatever face one could after this column. But this!! This takes right wing musing to a new level!! I want to put up my hand here to let every one know I fit in David Warren’s definition of a left wing troll. If wanting to stop the demented sodomizers from continuing on in their merry way as they have greatly done in the past because of their positions of power makes me a left wing troll then hell sign me up ! Gord I have to say this, if you defend this disgusting rant you must be paid to write this stuff and defend it. You could not defend this sick demented poison because you agree with what he said. Or could you???.

  10. dave says:

    I’ve coached kids, mostly teenagers, in sports for decades. Every once in a while I would see what Paterno had said or done, and I admired his attitude toward sports, coaching, and values that they could instill.
    But this thing seems to me a failure on his part. He heard what happened, he passed it on to his superior, then he left it alone.
    I think now about that part of the Milgram* experiments where they tell the pain givers that someone in a white coat has all the responsibility, and then a higher number of the pain givers, relieved of responsibility, give pain. I put this together with Hannah Arendt’s observation in her EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, where she says that much of the evil we do to each other, we do by just performing our little part of the job, not knowing, and not wanting ot know, the final outcome, and thinking that we have no responsibility for the main outcome that we are contributing to.
    When I was working, I think there were a number of times when I would say to someone something like: “I’m just doing my job. This pains you? Go talk to the people upstairs. Not my responsibility!”
    There were times too, when I took an action, reported something, followed up,… without getting an ok from the people upstairs. When they found out about it, they nailed me.
    In my union I often said things to the employer or to the public that had been voted for by the majority, even though I thought differently. I was, after all, their rep.
    We get all kinds of pressures in whatever corporate groups we belong to, to maintain the hierarchy. And, it is always tempting to err on the side of power. (And surely, the abused kids in this thing had no power.)
    In this instance, Paterno did what the hierarchy needed, and did not follow up on behalf of the kids. A guy’s got to get the priorities sorted out and decide how much he owes the organization he belongs to , and how much he owes to outsiders to that organization.

    * Milgram experiments…if you don’t know about them, you are in for an interesting read when you look them up…on your own.

    • Ted says:

      Except that Paterno was the hierarchy. What he wanted, he got. As has been repeated often this week, JoePa was “God” on campus. And firing him, rather than not re-hiring him at the end of the season resulted in outright riots.

      By passing this along to others, he was effectively saying ‘this is not important to me or my football program. Do what you want but don’t touch my football program’.

      And the “hierarchy” acted accordingly.

      And I say “he was effectively saying” only because we don’t know what he actually said, but we can imagine it.

  11. Mike says:

    I’ve never read David Warren before. I hope I never read him again.
    I’ve got three kids…I can’t imagine seeing a child being raped and waking away to report it to my boss…it’s one the of the few times I can imagine killing a person

  12. MC says:

    Warren excused ex-Catholic Bishop Lahey’s predilection for kiddy porn – it was the fault of “liberals”, he wrote. He’s always equating liberals with porn, casting himself as “chaste” and virtuous. He’s beyond odd; this was published a number of years ago in the Citizen:

    “Had these protesters sincerely wished to impale the slick insiders…They should have dressed themselves in power costumes with dark suits and pale silk ties and trimmed hair and scrubbed their faces down with eau de cologne to create the maximum confusion of identity; then walked about the perimeter of the conference with giant dildoes affixed to them as in Attic comedy. (Some could be dressed to precisely resemble the more eccentric forum guests for instance Swamiji Chidanand Saraswati Mustafa Ceric H.H. Patriarch Abuna Paulos and His Grace George L. Carey each of them crying out to be dildoed.)”

  13. Frank says:

    When Margaret Atwood talks about “southern Ontario gothic”, she means David Warren.

    That is the only way his possession of a public platform makes sense.

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