UNITED STATES
CBS News
By Julia Dahl
(CBS) NEW YORK – The recent revelations that the Boy Scouts of America have spent years covering up sexual abuse reports against their scout leaders came as no surprise to Professor Marci Hamilton.
“Boy Scouts, the Catholic church, the Citadel, Penn State, the Mormon church – it’s all the identical problem,” says Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and the author of “God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law.”
“They’ll ignore wrong-doing and bad behavior because it’s in the best interest of the institution not to have bad publicity.”
But the bad publicity has rained down, inserting “pedophile priests” into the lexicon and turning a storied college sports program into a national disgrace. And the tales keep on coming. This week alone, an official at USA Swimming was banned for life from the sport for covering up for a coach who allegedly began a sexual relationship with a swimmer when the girl was 13-years-old; and the leader of a megachurch in Tulsa, Okla. was hit with charges that she knew about sex abuse allegations against former church employees but kept the matter in-house instead of going to police.
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