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Via WSFA: Coach resigns over nude photo on Facebook
Oxford Hills Superintendent Rick Colpitts said Paul Withee apparently meant to send a naked picture of himself to his girlfriend, but accidentally posted the image on his Facebook page.
Withee took down the picture in a matter of minutes, but the damage was done. A student saw the photo and a parent reported it.
Attention humanity: nothing good can come of sending naked pictures of yourself to other people.
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@Doug Mataconis: These are the risks of life, I say.
I’m going to take the contrarian position here and argue that the coach is being treated unfairly. While it may be dumb to put your naked photo on the internet, it shouldn’t be a firing offense. Everyone seems to agree that it was just an accident based on misunderstanding settings in Facebook, not a deliberate act of exhibitionism.
And I really reject the idea that this has done some kind of harm to the students in that school. They probably just think it’s funny. If you accidentally saw someone naked (say, through an open window) would that cause you actual psychological harm? This is a leftover bit of Puritanism – the idea that “children” (here, high-school-age adolescents) need to be shielded from any knowledge that sex or sexuality exists, as if that were even possible.
This situation is more of the “zero tolerance” nonsense that permeates our schools. On the other side, zero tolerance policies make decisions easy–no thinking or evaluation involved. He may have done it “by mistake” but he may have done it because he’s a perv. Always err on the side of “the death penalty.”
