1-11-06

Megan

Not long ago I received an alarming flyer taped to my screen door.  Some group of concerned citizens in my neighborhood wanted me to know that a sexual offender had moved in, and he was living only a few blocks away from me.  Right on the flyer they had a grainy xeroxed picture of the skeevy little perp, and you know what?  Those cop shows are right, they do look just like everyone else, even in badly-contrasted photocopied mug shots.  According to the flyer, he had been convicted of felony corruption of a minor when he was caught in flagrante delicto with his victim.  She was 16.  He was 19.
          You see, that's the problem with the Megan Laws, they make little or no qualification for the actual nature of the conviction.  Solicitation of prostitution, aggravated rape, public urination, all three bear the same stamp under Megan:  Crimes of a sexual nature.  Anyone convicted is immediately subject to a lifetime of public scrutiny, public distrust.  Under Megan, everyone who has ever been convicted of a "sexual" crime is fair game, a potential child abductor, a serial rapist waiting to happen.  The bachelor-party groom who happened to be getting a lap dance when Vice raided the strip club, the frat-rat who got picked up for public indecency after streaking through the women's dorm with a Bill Clinton mask, they're the same under Megan as the filthy step-father that raped his wife's daughter and left her bobbing on the river.
          It bothers me that we have more and more laws on the books that make being stupid or being human a life-destroying crime.  But if it saves one child, can it be so bad?  Yes, it can.
          "For the sake of the children" is one of the most frustratingly useful ad populum arguments in the business.  There is no way to counter it without coming off as some kind of monster.  "Never again," is another good one because it immediately insinuates that any oppositions must, by their opposition, be in favor of a recurrence of the heinous thing.  No more 9/11's, no more Viet Nams, no more Megans; they're all the same.  Your rights have no standing in the face of these wrongs, and the fact that you oppose efforts to end them makes you somehow worse than Hitler.
          It has to stop.  We need to start thinking with our brains and not our hearts when these things come up.  We have to stop thinking, "What good will it do?" and start considering what harm it will do.  Even the Black Plague had an ultimate beneficial result:  The reduction in Europe's population put a premium on labor and brought an end to the Feudal system in most countries.  But it came at the cost of millions of lives.
          Similarly, Megan is destroying lives.  So is the War on Drugs.  And the War on Terror.
          No one can make you safe but you.  No one can keep your children safe but you.  Teach them that their bodies are theirs, and that no one has a right to touch them in any way that makes them uncomfortable.  Teach them that no matter what you will always be there for them and that the threats of evil men are as empty as their souls.  Don't teach them fear, children learn fear well enough on their own.