The Absurdity of Sex Offender Registries
You're a single dad traveling on vacation in Maine with your 9 year old daughter Megan when she tells you she has to wee. You pull over at a public rest stop and Megan goes in alone; she's too old for you to take her into the men's room and too young to be away from your view, so you sit on a bench outside keeping an eye on the door making sure no one absconds with her.
After a few minutes of watching children go in and out, a policeman comes over and asks you to turn around, you are under arrest for "visual sexual aggression against children in a public place". Yes, unbelievably Maine has such a law, "viewing children in a public place"; a Class D felony if the child is between 12 to 14 years old and a Class C felony if the child is under 12. After conviction, you have to register as a sex offender and most likely lose custody of your child.
Too weird for you? This is what's happening in America today, hysterical blindness in trying to protect children against predators. Our laws have become so ridiculous that we will soon incarcerate millions of people for made-up crimes in the name of protecting children in our War against Sex Offenders just as we have jailed millions unnecessarily in our War against Drugs. Certainly sex registries will be so full of names that they will be as thick as white pages and completely useless in identifying true pedophiles.
As for real child predators, we have made the situation worse for children, our child predator laws are so egregiously draconian that a child molester is forced to kill the child afterwards because he will serve less time for murder than for fondling a youngster which could land him in prison for life without parole. We have not in fact protected our children at all.
Let's all acknowledge that America is just a pubic hair-width away from 7th Century Middle East Islamic culture (that is to say, modern Middle East Islamic culture) in its approach to sexuality. Sure, we tolerate women walking around with their naked faces exposed but how we view sexuality has hardly progressed beyond the Salem witch-hunts.
Another example of how we have lost all common sense; this could happen to you:
Overlawyered Blog, 3 Jul 2005, "He grabbed girl’s arm — now he's a sex offender"
The judge agreed that 28-year-old Fitzroy Barnaby of Evanston, Ill. probably didn’t have any sexual intention when he grabbed a 14-year-old girl’s arm to chastise her (he says) for walking in front of his car. But unlawful restraint of a minor, the offense of which Barnaby was convicted, automatically qualifies as a sex offense under Illinois law. "Now, [Barnaby] will have to tell local police where he lives and won’t be able to live near a park or school." "I don’t really see the purpose of registration in this case. I really don’t," said Cook County judge Patrick Morse. "But I feel that I am constrained by the statute."
If I had the energy I could list thousands of cases every year where perfectly harmless acts by perfectly innocent citizens are converted into some sort of sex crime by overzealous prosecutors that end up requiring these poor, unlucky souls to register as sex offenders even though there was no violence and no one was even threatened with violence and in almost all cases where there is no victim at all, except the innocent party who was unfairly arrested. We have gone completely nuts. And worse, we have endangered the lives of the children even more than any sexual predator could ever have done.
Although one might think a joke about sexual harassment is unseemly, I do not believe any topic should be off limits to humor. Try this one on for size:
Every day, a male co-worker walks up very close to a lady standing at the coffee machine, inhales a big breath of air and tells her that her hair smells nice.
After a week of this, she can't stand it anymore, takes her complaint to a supervisor in the personnel department and states that she wants to file a sexual harassment grievance against him.
The Human Resources supervisor is puzzled by this decision and asks, 'what's sexually threatening about a co-worker telling you your hair smells nice?'
The woman replies, "It's Keith, the midget."
