To Al Lord: Listen to the PennState Community. Sit down. Shut Up.

Be it blessing or curse, our hyper-connected world allows formerly obscure persons to make sudden and universally recognized asses of themselves. Enter Albert Lord, a member of the Board of Trustees for Penn State University. His comments about Jerry Sandusky’s victims, rightly called out by the website Onward State, were despicable, as was Lord’s pathetic attempt to clarify them when given a chance to recant. Driving Lord’s apparent determination to make himself a repugnant and deranged sounding public fool is his fulminating defense of Graham Spanier, the former president of PSU, recently convicted for child endangerment.Spanier is a remarkable immigrant success story, a survivor of physical child abuse himself,  and a brilliant man. But he was successfully prosecuted for child endangerment because that’s exactly what he did. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s case was carefully crafted to track a simple statute and it did so with precision.Spanier was shown to have colluded- there is no other word for it- with two truly odious individuals, former Assistant Vice-President Gary Schultz and former Athletic Director Tim Curley. All were personally knowledgeable of suspected child victimization by Sandusky in 1998. Curley and Schultz were then faced with an eyewitness account of child rape by then grad- student Mike McQueary in 2001. Their response- the one they personally involved Spanier in- was to abandon an earlier plan to report Sandusky to authorities. Instead, they “reported” him to the charity he created, Second Mile, and told him not to bring children into PSU facilities. You can let that sink in, but it got worse, eight years and several victims later, when Curley and Schultz perjured themselves by telling risible lies to a Grand Jury about what McQueary told them.The same investigative Grand Jury lied to by Curley and Schultz recommended perjury charges against Spanier as well. These charges might have gone forward on all three had the testimony of Cynthia Baldwin, a former attorney for PSU, not been ruled inadmissible due to a legal technicality. In that testimony, Baldwin excoriated Spanier, calling him a dishonest man who lied to her about what he knew and when he knew it. Along with Schultz and Curley, Spanier may have stonewalled a subpoena request from that Grand Jury for 16 months.Spanier has repeatedly painted himself as attenuated from the obvious perfidy of Curley and Schultz, a stressed-out administrator facing multiple crises and perhaps making a regrettable call with little information.This is common claptrap.But to pretend that it has any merit whatsoever is not only insulting but downright dangerous. I say dangerous because, if men like Spanier, or Curley and Schultz- who in my mind continued to perjure themselves in Spanier’s trial- are allowed to create a shred of doubt in the minds of any of us about the indefensibility of their actions, then the occurrence of another gross institutional failure and the destruction of innocent lives is that much more likely.The callow parsing of what words were used by whom, batted between these three men (and also Joe Paterno himself) must find no purchase. Did they know the full scope of Jerry Sandusky’s sophistication as a predator and the depth of what he was doing? No, and it doesn’t matter. What they knew, first about the 1998 case and then from McQueary, clearly demanded a report to authorities trained and tasked with investigating child abuse. The deliberate choice all three men made to abandon a simple plan to refer a possibly dangerous man to civil authorities was preposterous, wanton and immoral. It was also illegal.Among the more ridiculous excuses they’ve made through lawyers is how careful they felt they had to be because of how loved and respected Sandusky was. Actually, Graham, Gary and Tim, Sandusky’s stature is exactly why you needed to act with more vigilance. A report to the Department of Public Welfare for an appropriate investigation would not have meant abandoning or betraying Sandusky. It would have been the right thing to do, and also the only lawful thing. Spanier is perhaps less morally guilty than the lying scum he colluded with for the sake of a football program. But he is equally criminally guilty, and his guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.The best thing Al Lord can do in the wake of that is to keep his vile mouth shut. I tend to think the vast majority of the Penn State community, valiantly facing this failure head-on so it's not repeated elsewhere, would appreciate that.For support, information, and to help with regard to the fight against the sexual abuse of boys, please visit www.malesurvivor.org (full disclosure: I serve on its Board of Directors), or www.1in6.org.