... of the bizarre legal system in this country that brands Wendy Whitaker of Macon GA as a Registered Sex Offender for the rest of her life...
... because when she was seventeen years old she got caught giving a blow job to a sixteen-year-old boy.
Read the entire bizarre story of how the government keeps raping Wendy Whitaker at Classically Liberal, and ask yourself, "Should I be able to find this poor woman's photo and detailed information on the Federal Department of inJustice website?" [Try it--it's easy. User friendly, you might say.]
I went to several of these Protect Your Children type websites that (for a modest fee) will tell you about sex offenders in your neighborhood. According to them, if I send in $12, I will get a list of the 35 registered sex offenders living in my zip code, right here in good old Pike Creek DE.
You have to wonder how many of them committed the egregious sin of a little groping, fondling, fingering, or fellating in the back seat with another teen a couple of months younger.
An UPDATE: For curiosity's sake I went through the Delaware Registry for my zip code. One guy, now in his forties, is listed as a Moderate Risk sex offender for having exposed his buttocks over ten years ago. More to the point of this post, there is a fifteen-year-old boy on the list who is now forever labeled as a sex offender because, he had some unspecified sexual contact with an eleven-year-old girl about five weeks after his thirteenth birth day. The offense, as written, is clearly a statutory rather than a predatory violation. So, just on one random check I pull up a guy who probably got drunk and mooned somebody, and an inquisitive young teen. I know I feel safer now that I'm sure these perverts have been marked for life.
I can only think of one really accurate description of what has happened to them, and to Wendy Whitaker: government-sponsored rape.
If you're sitting by your keyboard itching to tell me that if a sex offender registry saves just one child from molestation it's worth it to ruin the lives of literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of American citizens to give you the illusion of safety, then let me save us both the time it will take to answer your comment: you're a moron.
Wendy Whitaker's life is no less worth protecting than your darling child, who probably has bad manners, anyway.
If you're torn by the angst of balancing the public good against the individual's right to privacy, you've really already decided that, well, it's unfortunate and maybe some day we'll find a better balance between the State and the Individual... but you personally are not about to do anything in that direction.
You see, folks, what government gives you--either in homeland security, or registered sex offender laws, or even product safety testing--is the comforting illusion of security.
I suppose that's benign enough for some people, when the only cost is your tax dollars, but when it is the 747 out of 770 detainees at Gitmo who have never been charged with any crime [thanks, Waldo], the thousands of innocent people of sex offender registries, or even just the dogs that just happen to keep getting slaughtered by law enforcement officers looking for drugs in all the wrong places [appreciate it, JD]....
It's not benign any more. It's a f**king police state.
And, you know what? It didn't all come from Dubya.
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Now the kid is in early elementary school, and someone finds out. All of the sudden there's a huge push to kick the kid out of public school because of it. It was all the rage to bash this poor kid who really hasn't done anything since he was five... and he came from a very bad area of Seaford, which means private school was NOT an option, even if they would take him.
They ended up letting him stay in school, but not after 2 months of constant harassment from the community and the local newspapers.
I just looked up the registry (my memory was foggy) and this kid was 10, having unlawful contact with a 1-11 year old (I remember the story being a kid of the same age).
Still... what's the difference?
Where have I ever suggested that I didn't believe in a Constitutional right to privacy?