Abilene Reporter-News from Abilene, Texas • B2

2B Sunday, September 10, 2017 Abilene Reporter-News Opinion or with offense to friends or foes, we sketch your world exactly as it Lord Byron Guest columns for Other Views pages should be no fewer than 450 words and no more than 750, and must include a picture of the author and a one-sentence biography. Deadline for guest columns is noon Thursday for consideration for publication the next Sunday. Letters are printed in the order they are received as quickly as possible, space per- mitting. Letters must be 250 words or less and must include a name, address, phone number and email (if available). Opinion pieces may be edited for taste, clarity or length.

Letters and columns are limited to one every 30 days. Email letters and columns to porternews.com (please put in the subject line) or mail to Guest Letter to the Editor, Abilene Reporter-News, P.O. Box 30, Abilene, TX 79604. Fax to 325-670- 5242. Letters to the Editor At just past 6 p.m.

Saturday, a football will be launched into the West Texas wild blue yonder, as high and far as possible. And so begins a new era of on-campus football at Abilene Christian University. Not since the 1958 team has football been played on The Hill. P.E. Shotwell Stadium has been the Wildcats' home away from home.

Just three miles away but home, sweet home. Coincidentally, 1959 also was the first season for Shotwell. At various times, it also was the home field for Hardin-Sim- mons and McMurry universities. After bringing back football in 1990, HSU would move back to its campus into Shel- ton Stadium in 1993. McMurry plays its games at Wilford Moore Stadium, built in 1937, but called Indian Stadium until the school dropped the mascot name in 2006.

McMurry once played at Shotwell, too, but returned to campus in 1975. In 2007, the stadium was renamed to honor Moore, the successful former coach at McMurry. ACU's stadium has seats for 9,500 fans, dwarfing Shelton (4,000) and Wil- ford Moore But, of course, ACU now is playing at the NCAA Division I level (HSU and McMurry are Division III members) and should have a stadium to showcase. ACU's stadium indeed is a showcase. Being the newest and most modern, it's probably the best now in the Southland Conference.

The largest league stadium in Cowboy Stadium in Lake Charles, Loui- siana, home to McNeese State. It seats 17,610. The stadium already has changed the northeast Abilene skyline. While Abilene has its die-hard Wild- cats fans, Cowboys fans and War Hawks fans, we encourage all football fans to take in a game. It's not every day that a new stadium is built, anywhere.

This is cause for celebration for Abi- lene. Starting today, the Reporter-News is taking its own Wildcat Walk. For ACU fans, that will be the trek from campus to the stadium each Game Day. Starting with today's overview and an- swering the burning question of the past few months where is everybody going to park? we'll let you know what you need to know to attend a game. Congratulations to ACU and a thank- you to alumni who provided the funds to build Wildcat Stadium.

Donors Mark and April Anthony are honored with the nam- ing of Anthony Field at Wildcat Stadium. Rick Wessel, too, is honored with the naming of Wessel Scoreboard. This is a $42 million dream come true. It should be cheered by football-crazy fans across the area. The first game is Saturday, against conference rival Houston Baptist.

Go Wildcats! Our view Stadium a win-win for ACU, Abilene College football fans, your new season has arrived. Here come the parties, the pageantry, the action, and if your team is as good as you hope, some stirring victories and bowl game glory ahead. Sorry to spoil the fun, but are these worth it if your football team is cutting moral corners to get to the Promised Land? If the coaches, athletic department, and university administra- tion are turning blind eyes to star sexual predations? These are real questions, made all the more pressing by the rise and fall of the Baylor University team and a just- released book that throws harsh new light on this Christian university and the sexual assault crisis around its football program. The story at Baylor is so over-the-top that it would prob- ably break your credulity if it appeared in a novel. Aseries of football sexual assaults and an admini- willful obliviousness ended in the ouster of the coach, the athletic director and the university president, Kenneth Starr.

There have been eight lawsuits filed against the university and two ex-players convicted. (An appeals court overturned one of those convictions and ordered a new trial for the defendant.) All this at a school with that prides itself on its deeply Christian identity. Extreme though it is, the Baylor debacle is anything but a one-off, says Paula Lavigne, co-author the new book "Violat- ed: Exposing Rape at Baylor University amid College Foot- Sexual Assault Crisis." habit of shoving sexual assault cases under the rug is happening throughout the nation, throughout college says Lavigne, who authored the book with her ESPN colleague Mark Schlabach. hope that this story shows the dangers of doing Chief among those dangers: Young women experiencing the enduring trauma of sexual assault, compounded when gaslighting authorities take the side. By one count, there have been roughly 110 col- lege football sexual assault investigations and cases the past 40 years.

Jessica list begins with an alleged gang- rape at Notre Dame in the mid-1970s and ends with a slate of cases from 2016, at campuses including North Carolina, USC and Tennessee, in addition to Baylor. How many 2017 entries will she be adding? Seen from afar, Christian piety makes the foot- ball rape crisis especially hard to comprehend. Affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Baylor has long touted a culture of sexual and moral purity among its students. A team of Christian chaplains has worked closely with its sports teams. clear now that these guardrails were nothing against the much more potent force that swept over Waco with the arrival of football coach Art Briles in 2008.

Briles took a pe- rennial loser and transformed it into one of the top programs in the country, boosting campus spirit, alumni pride and the visibility. A Baylor Board of Regents member sums up the storyline like this: were winning, and things were awesome. hard to mess up awesome. Nobody wanted to mess it Indeed not. Which helps explain why coaches and admin- istrators even the chaplains seem to have gone out of their way to avoid seeing and confronting a pattern of play- ers sexual assaulting women.

As Lavigne and Schlabach doc- ument, then-head chaplain Wes Yeary mishandled a meeting with a student who came to him about being assaulted by one of the football star players. Rather than report the as- sault, Yeary gave the woman the spiritual equivalent of a pat on the head and sent her on her way. He eventually vouched for the player at penalty phase of his trial, adding extra salt to the wounds. Baylor now has a different president, different athletic di- rector and different coach, and it is hiring different chap- lains. Will all these differences make a difference? We shall see.

But the same inexorable pressure to win will push on the new guard just as it did the old, just as it does on all major college football programs. Ironically, Baylor its Truett Theological Seminary, to be exact is home to one of the most reform-minded sports chaplaincy leaders and trainers in the country, John White. Despite his expertise, White and his sports ministry program previously have been stiff-armed from playing a role in hir- ing and overseeing the football chaplains. Now in- cluded in the process as Baylor hires new chaplains. White is encouraged by that and other changes at the uni- versity, but acknowledges that unless there is a deeper change of heart and culture the old problems could storm back.

The same is true across college football. White says job one for the new president, Linda Living- stone, and the new athletics leadership should be making sure that Baylor football is kept in perspective and that the university has its priorities straight. of character and he says, before wins and losses. When done right, they are not mutually This is the lead that more college football fans need to fol- low. As long as the culture is obsessed with bigtime football and seeing our alma mater win, as long as we evaluate coach- es and players more on the basis of their competitive success than their character, scandals will keep on coming.

true, as the Baylor regent says, that no one wants to up Sometimes we need to. Tom Krattenmaker is a member of USA Board of Contributors. He writes on religion in public life and directs communications at Yale Divinity School. His books include Onward Christian Athletes on religion in sports. Football glory vs.

moral bankruptcy TOM KRATTENMAKER has been dropping in relative power along a descending curve of 60 duration, with the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. The fall of the American Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical transformation toward political and social forms within which the representative assembly the major political organism of post-Ren- aissance Western civilization does not have a primary political James Burnham, and the American (1959) WASHINGTON Today, worse is bet- ter. The manifest and mani- fold inadequacies might awaken a slum- bering Congress to the existence of its Article I powers and responsibilities. As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed devotion to all 12 of the seven articles. As president, Barack Obama, discerning a defect in the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supplied Article VIII, which has expired.

It stipulated: Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2017, the president shall have the power to do whatever Congress declines to So, when Congress did not confer le- gal status on (immigrants brought to America illegally as chil- dren), he did it. He conferred such status and attendant benefits on a large catego- ry of people and called this patently leg- islative act a routine exercise of law en- forcement discretion. As a candidate, policy re- garding Dreamers made up in concision what it lacked in reflection: have to As a president whose incoherence has a kind of majesty, he says he has love for these who are when they are not engaged in rampant criminality.

When he is not pardoning scofflaw sheriff Joe Arpaio for his anti-immigrant criminality, Trump casts immigration as a law-and-order is- sue. So does Attorney General Jeff Ses- sions, who preaches fire-and-brimstone law and order when he is not encourag- ing legalized theft under forfei- whereby government enriches it- self by seizing the property of persons not convicted of crimes. Sessions, whose canine loyalty to Trump is not scrupu- lously reciprocated, seemed to relish the privilege of announcing policy that, absent action from a Congress that is especially loath to act on immigration, could punish 800,000 children for what their parents did long ago. policy now is to state that policy will expire in six months unless Congress chooses to word it. If Congress does not, Trump will do something: will revis- it this Perhaps his exclamatory punctuation foreshadows something as forceful, meaning as unilateral, as what Obama did.

What Obama did was popular and un- constitutional. The latter attribute prob- ably does not interest succes- sor, but the former attribute evidently does. Hence Trump has sent this hot-po- tato issue where it belongs, to Congress, which now faces the unaccustomed ago- ny of actually setting national policy. In 1959, before the exhilarating expe- rience of Ronald presidency, congressional supremacy was still a ten- et of conservatism. At that time, James Burnham, a founding editor of the then 4-year-old "National Review," wondered whether Congress could as an autonomous, active political entity with some measure of real power, not merely as a rubber stamp, a name and a ritual, or an echo of powers lodged The slope of the long descending curve might be changing.

Email George Will at george Will Congress be stirred from its slumber? GEORGE WILL TODAY IN HISTORY: On this date in 1931, Salvatore Maranzano, a New York City crime boss, is shot and stabbed by four men for Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Luciano for a time lived at the Waldorf Astoria but claimed little income. He was abducted and stabbed with an ice pick, but it missed the juglar and he lived. He'd rise to power after World War II, then was deported to Italy..