When you get a new appliance, do you take time to fill out the little card and register your toaster, coffee maker or iron? Of course you do, if you want the company to keep track of it and fix it in the event of a breakdown.
We’re pretty good in America about registering things. We register our preferences for baby shower or wedding gifts to avoid duplications. Voting registries make sure only those eligible can cast a ballot. We register our motorcycles, boats and cars so we — and the police — can keep track of them.
What we don’t do is keep tabs on people who abuse and neglect children. The overwhelmed young single mother who physically harms her children, the violent boyfriend who wants the other man’s children out of his way, the uncaring babysitter who disciplines with slaps and punches. Such violence against children often escalates to the point of murder. Full Editorial
As I have said in this forum before, violence is OK in this society, it is sex that is considered to be so dangerous. Thus, we have sex offenders register, but those who commit actual violence do not have to register. (Yes, some sex offenses are offenses of violence. But they are not having to register because of the violence part of it but because of the sex part of it. If they simply beat someone half to death, and it was the 454th time they did that, they would not have to register.)
And they always scream about children, even as so many of those forced to register did nothing with children.
And now here is the shouting about children again, to justify more registering, to those who harm children.
Be very wary any time you here the mention of children, or of seniors. That is what is always shouted to justify the unjustifiable. Be every dubious any time you hear a mention of children or seniors.
Those that develop sex offender registry websites that give misinformation to extort money from those on the registry to have their names removed actually does much harm to the actual registry under the colors of looking official. Of those that wish to copycat these type of websites… can they do it legally if they state in fine print, “for entertainment purposes only” … This will destroy the credibility of all the sites I suspect. If it is done under the prose of entertainment how can it be challenged? These BS sites may become the undoing of the Sex Offender Registry itself. If the Registry is so discredited what of the other parts attached to it?
When you register a car, you drive the car. When you register an appliance, you use the appliance.
When you put up a list and call it the “sex offender registry”, the very semantics of that phrase give the public the impression that everyone on the list is the worst of the worst and can’t help but re-offending. That is why we need you to watch them. And it follows that you may wonder why, if the government knows these people are dangerous, are you allowing them in our community?
The public no longer trusts the registry to protect them and calls the government to enact more restrictive laws. And the politicians say, “give us stronger laws and more prisons, and thy will be done. We don’t have enough prisons and the liberal courts keep letting them out” Because the new laws make people more aware of the “danger”, the cycle continues. The government sits back and rakes in political and financial capital.
The solution. Journalists, do your job. Get all the facts. Uphold the Constitution. Stand up. Have a voice. Down with facsism.