“Sounds like you enjoy sex with kids,” a reader tweeted at me after seeing a blog post I wrote about former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. It was 2015, and Fogle had just signed a plea agreement in which he admitted to looking at child pornography and having sex with two 16-year-old prostitutes. “You also look like [a] pervert,” the reader added.
That’s the sort of response you can expect if you write about the broad category known as “sex offenders” and suggest that not all of them are the same or that some of them are punished too severely. In this case, I had noted that the decision to prosecute Fogle under federal law, which had been justified by factors that had little or nothing to do with the gravity of his offenses, had a dramatic impact on the penalty he was likely to receive. Full Article
The truth is there will always be those who take things to an extreme. It is prevalent on almost EVERY topic. The problem sex offenders have is there is no rational voice in the mix to sort of ground the extremes. The intelligent, cordial sex offender usually isn’t willing to draw attention to himself out of shame and no one else who hasn’t been branding is willing to raise their voice either.
To me, the modern day sex offender is the perfect example of a minority in need of help from the tyranny of the majority. Yet, the courts have turned a blind eye.
“Stigmatizing these people as a threat to children everywhere for the rest of their lives may seem irrational, but that does not mean it fails the rational basis test. “Under rational basis review,” Hamilton explained, “a law ‘may be overinclusive, underinclusive, illogical, and unscientific and yet pass constitutional muster.'”
Well, it doesn’t pass constitutional muster when the constitution includes “No Bill of Attainder may be passed”.
Those who don’t know the basics of a Bill of Attainder can see it on wikipedia.
In the words of Edmund Burke ” The only thing necessary for triumph of evil, is for good to do nothing”