Last night I lay awake in bed with a puzzle racking my brain. How can I finish the sentence “sex offenders shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because ____”?
It’s an exercise I go through often, and certainly during every legislation session, where someone comes up with a new “sex offender” rule and I try to play devil’s advocate and come up with some previously unforeseeable scenario, where I can make the rule seem rational.
Sex offenders can’t be garbage men? OK… how about ‘sex offenders shouldn’t be allowed to haul garbage because they may drive past a kid and toss them in the truck?’ Or, how about ‘sex offenders shouldn’t be permitted to work as garbage men because they could rummage through people’s trash looking for discarded photos of children.”
Or last year’s ridiculous “drone bill”? OK… how about ‘sex offenders shouldn’t be allowed to own drones because drones may have cameras with which they can take pictures of kids… (as opposed to cell phones or actual cameras)’? Or, how about ‘sex offenders shouldn’t be allowed to own drones, because they may have an aerial fetish and could mishandle the remote control while masturbating which could cause it to crash and injure a child’?
But no matter how hard I thought about it or how random a scenario I envisioned, I could not come up with any rational reason why a bill that would restore voting rights to felons in Florida would expressly exclude murderers and sex offenders.
I saw this news yesterday. I had the same question: Why exclude anyone? There’s literally no reason why someone who may have beaten people to within an inch of their lives have their voting rights restored, but someone who was convicted of having images or even consensual relationship that was maybe off by a week legally, be excluded?
Does anyone possibly have actual stated arguments for such an exclusion?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/florida-is-ranked-the-worst-state-in-the-us/ar-BBIq1rc?ocid=spartandhp