Quelle Shockeroo--The "Bad Guy" in the Toronto Life Article on Ben Levin Isn't Ben Levin

I have now read and digested Lauren McKeon's article in the August Toronto Life about Ben Levin ("The Ben Levin story: beloved professor turned sex offender" is how it's billed on the magazine's cover), and if you're looking for insight into why this man, a mega-star of academe, sabotaged his career via his pervy pedophilic proclivities, you may want to save your shekels. There is little that is new here, and nothing that you haven't read in the raft of reports about Levin's arrest and subsequent trial. If you're like me, you likely already knew that such inclinations set in early, are next to impossible to "cure," and that the online world affords those with these unnatural and criminal hankerings a place to hang out and encourage one another.

And while the author of the piece in no way condones or downplays Levin's actions, she does single out a particular group for opprobrium--and it ain't the pervs. It's the people who had the temerity to question whether Levin who, let's not forget was Kathleen Wynne's second in command when she was Ontario's Minister of Education, had a hand in creating Ontario's new (and somewhat pervy) sex-ed curriculum. Re those who dared raise such alarms McKeon writes:

Levin acquired an army of rabid critics, people who believed he was instrumental in developing Ontario's new sex education curriculum as a grooming manual for child abuse (the Ministry of Education said he wasn't involved in its creation). In dozens of letters written to the court, Levin's opponents urged the judge to sentence him to the maximum jail time allowed, adding that "his perverted sexual attraction to children" had guided his professional life. One New Brunswick man wrote that he was "a creepy little man" and that "anyone with more IQ points than teeth sees [his work] as deliberately and prematurely sexualizing children."

Well, how dare he? The New Brunswick man, I mean, and not that nice Mr. Levin, who was in the grip of appetites he was unable to control. As for the Ministry of Ed's claim: if someone in that august bureaucracy makes a bald assertion, it behooves us, the little people, to swallow it, no questions asked. After all, no one in McGuinty-Wynne Liberal regimes has ever been known to knowingly tell a lie, right?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but you can blame it on McKeon.

You can now thank me for reading her article--and saving you a bunch of cash.