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Stripperservice advertises in girls' high school basketball program

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Hard-core controversy
By RON COOK
January 9, 2004


You have to wonder about the motivation of a person who owns a company that provides male and female exotic dancers and chooses to do a little advertising in a girls' high school basketball game program.


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And what of the parent or parents who accepted that ad for their school's game program? Are they so interested in the extra financial support for their kid's team that they're willing to take an ad that includes an address for a hard-core pornographic web site?

And where's the school's oversight? The game program is a parents' project, but shouldn't someone in authority at the school take a final look at the product before it's printed and distributed to players and fans?

It probably comes as no surprise that it was hard to find people at Oakland Catholic High School in Pittsburgh who were willing to answer those questions this week. Dr. Maureen Marsteller, the principal, did not return a telephone message. Athletic director George Rudolf and girls basketball coach Rich Irr declined comment when reached, citing Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh policy.

That left The Rev. Ron Lengwin, a spokesman for the diocese, to say: "Everyone involved in this is totally embarrassed by it. They're going to pull all of the books and try to find out how something like this could have happened."

The ad in question was on page 50 of the Oakland Catholic program. It's so outrageous that it's easy to think the business owner almost was trying to mock the diocese. The ad promotes the company's dancers at bachelor and bachelorette parties, sports parties and divorce parties. I've never heard of a divorce party, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be looked on favorably by those of the Catholic faith.

I called up the web site provided in the ad and was greeted with this warning:

"The material on this server is adult oriented and/or sexually explicit ... This site provides access to images of nude adults possibly engaging in sexual acts ..."

"Oh, my," Father Lengwin said after hearing the details. "That kind of ad is contrary to everything we stand for. It goes against our academic mission and educational purpose."

You probably also won't be surprised to learn that the business owner declined to return a telephone message.

My problem isn't with him or her so much as it with the parents who accepted the ad. It's not all of the Oakland Catholic parents, of course. If you saw their touching tributes to the players on the team in the 72-page program, you'd realize that every kid should be so lucky to have such caring, devoted parents.

But to say that the people who put together the program used some horrible judgment would be grossly understating it. I'm not so sure it was simply a bad mistake, as Father Lengwin called it. There also were two advertisements for beer distributors in the program. I'm told that's fairly common in high school game programs these days, but it still strikes me as being inappropriate, especially at a time when we're preaching more than ever to our kids about the dangers of underage drinking.

If there's anything to be learned from this, it's that schools can't take anything for granted. They can't blindly trust that the parents' groups and boosters clubs always are going to make the right decisions even when their own children are involved. It seemed clear after talking to Father Lengwin that no one at Oakland Catholic was aware of the objectionable ad. If someone at the school had taken a cursory look at the program before it went to the printer, this embarrassment could have been avoided.

The Oakland Catholic players deserved as much.

The adults really let them down on this one.

- Contact Ron Cook at rcook(at)post-gazette.com.


(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)

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