Angry.

There are some things in this world that make me very angry, even though I have no connection to these things, that it makes me want to spit nails. One of these occasions have occurred. I wasn’t going to write about this, but I feel that I need to.

There is a teacher in the Mystic Valley Regional High School (in Massachusetts) named Kevin Hogan. Well liked by his students, Mr. Hogan is a sports coach and I believe an English teacher. Earlier this week, Mike Beaudet (Twitter handle = @channel_mike) from Boston’s Fox affiliate, Fox 25 went “Fox Undercover” and confronted Mr. Hogan, on camera without warning, about a couple of gay porn videos he had participated in a few years ago. Apparently these videos were released to the public last year. Caught completely off guard by this confrontation, Mr. Hogan denied everything but was then put on administrative leave from MVRHS after the news story ran on the Fox affiliate. The reporter was kind enough to share some clips from the videos during the newscast. The teacher has never exposed his students to porn, by Mike Beaudet gleefully exposed the world to it by sharing it on the Fox News broadcast.

Here’s where I get angry:

1. The teacher has done nothing wrong as a teacher. He hasn’t been inappropriate with any of his students and no sort of accusations of this sort have come forth. He is well respected by students and faculty. Because of this, his life is now destroyed. What is gained by this?

2. The reporter is painting this behavior in the same light as the recent sexual allegations at Penn State and Syracuse University. THAT IS BULLSHIT. The teacher had sex with a consenting adult. Nothing illegal happened, there were no goats involved and everyone was well above the age of consent. The man had sex with another man; it just happened to be in front of a camera. Has anyone noticed that most pedophiles are not gay men but rather heterosexual men? Why doesn’t anyone ever notice that.

3. The teacher has never discussed this part of his life with his students nor was he recruiting anyone to become a porn star. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. Some argue that a teacher must uphold a higher moral standard. Show me a teacher that smokes and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t meet my standard. It doesn’t mean they’re unfit to teach. Having sex with a consenting adult is far less damaging to a person than smoking is.

4. This was a ratings stunt, plain and simple. A man’s career was destroyed in the interest of garnering higher ratings. THIS IS WHAT AMERICAN MAINSTREAM NEWS HAS BECOME. Every time I read or hear something like this, a little part of the American inside of me dies, because we are drifting so far away from what made this country great it’s not even funny. American mainstream news does this all the time. They’re after ratings to generate more ad revenue. Accuracy and solid facts have little to do with the story.

I have retweeted a couple of the thousands of comments to the news reporter on my Twitter feed. Dignity is preventing me from formulating my own tweet and saying how I really feel about the reporter. Many are calling for the firing of this reporter and the support for the teacher far overwhelms the “shock and outrage” of the teacher’s past.

I’m sorry. I don’t think that a teacher’s past should be held against him, especially when it has no bearing on who or what he is today. Shame on Fox 25 and especially on Mike Beaudet, the “investigative reporter”. This is blatant homophobia under a thin veil of disguise. And quite frankly, it disgusts me.

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