pedophile

REALLY?! So the students can become sympathetic to the pedophile's plight? Because there's gaining insight, if not understanding or sympathy, and then there's giving a sick sick person a chance to explain just why they enjoy it so and justify it. There's some abysses that don't need to be peered into, especially for the sake of art/entertainment. Sorry, that's just a world of NO.

My crazy theatre director has reached new levels of insanity. We are doing a play with a storyline about pedophilia and he has decided he wants to bring in a pedophile to talk to the students!!!

Danger, university legal department, danger!

THIS. There HAS to be someone up the chain of command you can talk to.

Went to high school with him.

Most of my FB friends list is left-leaning (or at least not very happy with the current Republican platform), but there's at least one woman on there who I know from high school on my friends list who changed her picture -- not her thumbnail profile picture, but the big one on the Timeline page (what is that? background? cover photo?) -- to a big glorious banner of Romney. It made me want to throw up a little. She also posted last night that she was looking forward to "watching our next vice-president speak at his convention."

I almost commented to ask why Biden was speaking at the Republican convention, but I decided to not stir shit.

When my parents got there, all the food had been tv dinners, and the one supposed to clean was too afraid to do so, in case she got yelled at for throwing out the empty used dirty tv dinner trash.

Wow.

He called Obama a communist and said Sharia law was going to be installed in America.

WOW.

My crazy theatre director has reached new levels of insanity. We are doing a play with a storyline about pedophilia and he has decided he wants to bring in a pedophile to talk to the students!!!

WOW!!

Has everyone lost their everloving minds??

I also don't understand the Sharia law thing. I had a moment, before Katrina was so botched by GWB that I thought there might be a plot to abandon term limits and elect GWB again, but I realized I was nuts

Sophia,

Not for nothing, but among the students who may be in attendance may be victims. Has this person considered that?

Not for nothing, but among the students who may be in attendance may be victims. Has this person considered that?

Almost certainly not, right? This is the kind of idea that makes national news headlines, it's so poorly conceived.

My drama teacher in HS liked to tell stories about his drama teacher, who would slap and berate the drama students, all in the name of drama or something, making them cry and piss themselves and go into panic attacks, because he was trying to glean a "true performance" out of them. To seek some inner depths or darkness or whatever. That's when I decided to stick to lighting and sound.

Has everyone lost their everloving minds??

For the most part? Yeah, I think so.

Even with someone who usually gets bored and doesn't follow through, I'd escalate this one. Because, um, we don't invite pedophiles to schools to interact with children. Unless we want really awful publicity and huge (justifiable) lawsuits and going to a really extra-special hell if one is a hell believer.

To be fair, they are college students, right? BUT STILL.

I agree with everyone else - it's not just a bad idea, it's an actively malignant idea. Firing, lawsuits, hideous headlines. And, yes, there's absolutely certain to be a survivor (at the very least, family member of a survivor) involved in the production. Escalate that shit right up, because that really really needs to never happen. Preferably via a wayback machine that causes him to never have thought of it in the first place, but just stopping him cold and scaring him badly enough that he never thinks of it again without full-body shudders will also do.

Also, yes, everyone has lost their ever-lovin' minds.

Not unrelatedly, anyone who hasn't already done so should run over to the Atlantic website and read Ta-Nehisi Coates's brilliant "Fear of a Black President," but under no circumstances should anyone ever read the comments (he vigorously banhammers his own blog but doesn't have that privilege for the online versions of actual print articles).