The Joe Paterno Syndrome: Idealization and the Corruption of Morality

On the evening of November 9th, more than a thousand Penn State college students vehemently protested the firing of their beloved hero, Joe Paterno, the legendary football couch of Penn State, for not reporting to the police in 2002 his knowledge of coach Jerry Sandusky raping and sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in an athletic facility. Instead, Paterno merely passed the information on to school administrators, allegedly because Sandusky was already retired. The administrators punished Sandusky by depriving him of keys to the university locker room but left him with access to a university office, to young men at Penn State and to boys in the vicinity. Like Paterno, neither the administrators nor Graham Spanier, Penn State president, reported this incident to the police, which left Sandusky free to continue molesting children. In response to the public outcry over charges that Sandusky sexually corrupted eight children and to rectify these horrific lapses in moral judgment, the Board fired the president and Paterno. But the protesting students didn’t seem to care about Paterno’s moral lapse. They were protesting the Board’s injustice to Paterno. His sin of omission, allowing a child molester to continue molesting, paled in comparison to losing their beloved football idol.

Unfortunately, this is quite common. Loving or caring about someone frequently blinds one to their trespasses. One is inclined to see them as all good, and to deny their faults in order to preserve one’s idealization of them. Women who love their incestuous, child-molesting husbands or boyfriends frequently protect them to the detriment of their victimized children. Molested children often blame themselves for the molestations and deny the culpability of their molesters, in order to preserve what feels like a vital tie to their sadistic love objects. [more]

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