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This is an editorial article about this, but of the two articles I read about it, this one offers up the most info on the situation:
Oh yuck.
That has to be the universal reaction to Casey Toner’s story Friday about a suburban Chicago high school girls varsity basketball coach’s recent foray into sexually suggestive self-help writing.
Once you collect your jaw off the floor, that is.
But hold on to that jaw — there’s more.
Other teachers at Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields knew about the book, obviously — a fellow teacher edited head coach Bryan Craig’s explicit self-published 60-page tract, It’s Her Fault, which contains, among its attempts to share his sexual wisdom and supposed knowledge of women and their ways, graphic passages on the vaginal qualities of women of various races, examples of which cannot be published in a family newspaper.
After news broke in the Southtown Star, the tenured teacher, who also acts as a counselor, was put on leave.
One would hope so. What took them so long?
Let us talk for a moment about freedom of speech.
The United States Constitution has a First Amendment, which is rightly cherished by all Americans. What the First Amendment does is order that the government “shall make no law” regarding the establishment of religion or “abridging the freedom of speech.”
The government.
It does not absolve citizens from the consequences of their speech, however.
This detail flies by people.
“He has his constitutional right to free speech,” Rich Township High School District 227 Supt. Donna Simpson Leak said, at first, before sounder heads prevailed and Craig was suspended.
How could it be otherwise? How could Craig and how many other teachers at Rich Central have thought this was OK? That he could go on coaching girls basketball while peddling sex tips on Amazon?
Yes, writing salacious literature is not illegal. Nor is being a bouncer at a strip club.
But the education of children, the coaching of youth teams, is not just another job. There is a higher standard of behavior, and given the stark example of Penn State, where a former member of the football coaching staff was permitted to rape children on school property while officials looked the other way, you’d think that protecting children would be foremost in mind of any responsible school officials.
You’d think that any decently run school would be sensitive to the coach of a girls team who was writing quasi-pornographic “advice” where he bragged about his conquests and discussed penis size.
It’s the school’s job now to separate him from kids — they should have done so immediately, without requiring the spotlight of media attention to turn on his inaction.
If he’s the greatest coach in the world, the greatest counselor ever, and the girls want to protest that he is being ill-served, they should do so. If parents want to insist that the man who urges young women to be promiscuous, who brags of having five sexual partners at the same time, who wrote “the easiest kill for a man is through the young lady with low self-esteem,” should have access to their daughters, well, then that is their right. Perhaps that sentence is meant to be cautionary to young women — it is within the realm of possibility.
But somehow I doubt it. My guess is that even if the school is slow to fire Craig, that parents will push to demand it and wonder why it wasn’t done sooner. A man has the right to write what he likes, but the public has a right to draw away in disgust. Bryan Craig has a wife and kids, and perhaps just didn’t think through the consequences of his actions. He is thinking about them now, I’ll bet. But he has not only insulted the girls he coaches and supposedly cares about, but he has done a disservice to all his fellow coaches and teachers, who view their students and athletes with genuine, chaste affection, not as a harem of “the fairer sex” whose private parts can be speculated upon in print.
Even if the book is just spectacularly bad judgment, even if Craig apologizes to everyone he has so obviously insulted, he has leered his way out of a job.
It doesn’t take much. A touch. A look. An inappropriate word. Or, in this case, a book of crude innuendo and sex tips. He has a right to publish it. Don’t the girls of Rich Central have a right to a different coach? One who has better sense than this? I hope so.
Oh yuck.
That has to be the universal reaction to Casey Toner’s story Friday about a suburban Chicago high school girls varsity basketball coach’s recent foray into sexually suggestive self-help writing.
Once you collect your jaw off the floor, that is.
But hold on to that jaw — there’s more.
Other teachers at Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields knew about the book, obviously — a fellow teacher edited head coach Bryan Craig’s explicit self-published 60-page tract, It’s Her Fault, which contains, among its attempts to share his sexual wisdom and supposed knowledge of women and their ways, graphic passages on the vaginal qualities of women of various races, examples of which cannot be published in a family newspaper.
After news broke in the Southtown Star, the tenured teacher, who also acts as a counselor, was put on leave.
One would hope so. What took them so long?
Let us talk for a moment about freedom of speech.
The United States Constitution has a First Amendment, which is rightly cherished by all Americans. What the First Amendment does is order that the government “shall make no law” regarding the establishment of religion or “abridging the freedom of speech.”
The government.
It does not absolve citizens from the consequences of their speech, however.
This detail flies by people.
“He has his constitutional right to free speech,” Rich Township High School District 227 Supt. Donna Simpson Leak said, at first, before sounder heads prevailed and Craig was suspended.
How could it be otherwise? How could Craig and how many other teachers at Rich Central have thought this was OK? That he could go on coaching girls basketball while peddling sex tips on Amazon?
Yes, writing salacious literature is not illegal. Nor is being a bouncer at a strip club.
But the education of children, the coaching of youth teams, is not just another job. There is a higher standard of behavior, and given the stark example of Penn State, where a former member of the football coaching staff was permitted to rape children on school property while officials looked the other way, you’d think that protecting children would be foremost in mind of any responsible school officials.
You’d think that any decently run school would be sensitive to the coach of a girls team who was writing quasi-pornographic “advice” where he bragged about his conquests and discussed penis size.
It’s the school’s job now to separate him from kids — they should have done so immediately, without requiring the spotlight of media attention to turn on his inaction.
If he’s the greatest coach in the world, the greatest counselor ever, and the girls want to protest that he is being ill-served, they should do so. If parents want to insist that the man who urges young women to be promiscuous, who brags of having five sexual partners at the same time, who wrote “the easiest kill for a man is through the young lady with low self-esteem,” should have access to their daughters, well, then that is their right. Perhaps that sentence is meant to be cautionary to young women — it is within the realm of possibility.
But somehow I doubt it. My guess is that even if the school is slow to fire Craig, that parents will push to demand it and wonder why it wasn’t done sooner. A man has the right to write what he likes, but the public has a right to draw away in disgust. Bryan Craig has a wife and kids, and perhaps just didn’t think through the consequences of his actions. He is thinking about them now, I’ll bet. But he has not only insulted the girls he coaches and supposedly cares about, but he has done a disservice to all his fellow coaches and teachers, who view their students and athletes with genuine, chaste affection, not as a harem of “the fairer sex” whose private parts can be speculated upon in print.
Even if the book is just spectacularly bad judgment, even if Craig apologizes to everyone he has so obviously insulted, he has leered his way out of a job.
It doesn’t take much. A touch. A look. An inappropriate word. Or, in this case, a book of crude innuendo and sex tips. He has a right to publish it. Don’t the girls of Rich Central have a right to a different coach? One who has better sense than this? I hope so.
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