America's Unjust Sex Laws

[BTOWN_HUSTLA]

Cover of this week's economist.

I've held this view for quite some time. A lot of the punishments and stimgas are emotionally based. My problem is that other crimes, we don't have a registry for. Wouldn't you like to know if your neighbor has EVER been convicted of a felony then? Why just sex offenders? Because of their psychological condition which assumes their crimes are part of a pattern? Isn't it like that with any criminal?

I say, if we do it for sex offenders, we do it for all violent and property crimes. selective, emotional based vilification hardly is a way for a decent society to live.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14164614&source=hptextfeature

Punish first, think later

The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists.
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The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.
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Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

 

[Minstrel]

Thanks to the US' puritan roots, the country has an extremely regressive attitude toward sex, by implicit tradition. Sex/nudity is considered a much more dangerous problem to many than violence, which is insane and wrong-headed. There's much less antipathy to sex and nudity throughout most of the rest of the Western world.

 

[Natebishop3]

Thanks to the US' puritan roots, the country has an extremely regressive attitude toward sex, by implicit tradition. Sex/nudity is considered a much more dangerous problem to many than violence, which is insane and wrong-headed. There's much less antipathy to sex and nudity throughout most of the rest of the Western world.

If only those damn Puritans had left the Union back during Madison's administration......

 

[The Sebastian Express]

Child molesters and rapists should have to register, but the idea that urinating in public and visiting a prostitute is a sexual offense is laughable.

 

[Chutney]

Thanks to the US' puritan roots, the country has an extremely regressive attitude toward sex, by implicit tradition. Sex/nudity is considered a much more dangerous problem to many than violence, which is insane and wrong-headed. There's much less antipathy to sex and nudity throughout most of the rest of the Western world.

You only have to look at your movie rating system to see a great example of that. The scale of inappropriateness tends to be: swearing => violence => sex => homosexual sex