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	When Will They Ever Learn? By Noemie Emery Washington Examiner November 22, 2011 http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/11/when-will-they-ever-learn A few years ago, the Catholic Church had a scandal involving a priest who molested small children. Because the news might damage its reputation, the priest was kept on. Years later, the scandal exploded, and the blow to the church's image was never repaired. The Peace Corps and Boy Scouts also had scandals, and their stories were similar. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting new results from it, but this didn't stop Penn State University from repeating the process. The first reaction to this is "My God, how awful." The second is "When will they learn?" What do these four institutions all have in common? Some fairly interesting things. All assume high levels of moral authority: The Catholic Church considers itself The Church; the Boy Scouts are icons; the Peace Corps is the last glimmer of New Frontier magic; and Penn State was almost the Peace Corps of football, with a head coach who quoted great poets, gave millions to charity and produced scholar-athletes. All did good works, and as such were prey to the worst form of sedition: As Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where they keep money, perverts gravitate to schools, churches and charities because that's where the people they hope to turn into victims are found. Nick Gillespie says the free market would never allow this. "Unlike the Catholic Church or Penn State, which have heavily insulated revenue streams, companies know that even the whiff of child-molesting scandals are not simply bad for business, but catastrophic all the way around." But "heavily insulated revenue streams" are not the main reason. Perverts don't prey upon young hotshots in corporate business suits. They prey on the young, and the scared. Sad to say, all the churches, synagogues, schools, charities and children's sports programs around are targets for creeps, who are not merely fiendish but fiendishly clever, and adept not only at seducing children but allaying suspicions of parents and peers. Take this enhanced vulnerability, apply it to people deeply invested in their institutions' good names, and you have for yourself a toxic dynamic, in which self-destruction sets in: The school (the church, the program) does so much good. The good of the many is worth the pain of a limited number of victims. How can we embarrass our friends? So the priest is recycled through more and more parishes, and the boat isn't rocked. Complaints mount about the coach, and the boat keeps on floating. Then a wave comes that knocks the boat over, swallows the crew and leaves the boat stranded. A one-day story that would have hurt and then been forgotten is a multiyear media frenzy. The story repeats itself, over and over. Nobody learns. That nobody learns is also astounding, as issues of simple self-interest apply. Forget "suffer the children." Forget "do unto others." When these things happen -- and it is in the nature of schools and of churches that they will sometimes happen -- it is in the interests of the institutions to have them cut off at the bud. Politicians can learn: House Speaker John Boehner learned from the Mark Foley scandal, and cut off Rep. Christopher Lee the first time he got wind of the photo in which Lee gazed in his mirror, sans shirt. In 2006, Foley sank the Republicans. In 2010, Republicans, without their rogue member, delivered the "thumping" themselves. What works for the pols ought to work for the priests and the scholars. Will Penn State be enough to make them see reason? If not, then when will they learn? Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
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