If you don’t like ’em, just get rid of ’em or kill ’em

Heinous and unwarranted persecution of sex offenders, a tiny number of whom pose any real threat to anyone and a majority of whom haven’t even done anything remotely wrong at all, never stops. Now, the American Family Association is concerned with the Silver Sage Girl Scouts group in Twin Falls, Idaho, who have decided to move their headquarters when they discovered that – *gasp!* – 50 sex offenders live within a one-mile radius of their current location. Here’s what the AFA has to say about it:

The problem is, there's no place for them to move. Their new location, it turns out, is smack dab in the middle of 23 registered sex offenders. We clearly must do something more permanent with sex offenders - either lock them up for life or put them to death if they are guilty of the rape of a child. If either sex offenders or the Girl Scouts have to be inconvenienced, I vote for sex offenders.

Such thinking is abhorrent (which has become typical of any organization espousing conservative family values these days). First of all, as Ed Brayton explains:

There are about 700,000 people on state sex offender lists at the moment. But in five states, that includes someone who is arrested soliciting a prostitute. In 13 states, that includes someone arrested for urinating in public. In 29 states, it includes teenagers who had sex with other teenagers. In 32 states, it includes someone arrested for streaking or flashing, something every frat boy has done from time to time during rush week.

In one study of the Georgia sex offender list, the review board that oversees that list determined that 65% of the more than 17,000 people on the list were not a threat to anyone at all. Only about 100 of them were actually classified as predators. That's just over one half of one percent of the people on the list.

So, you’re right, American Family Institute (in particular Bryan Fischer, the writer of this tripe). We need to make sex offenders’ lives even harder and more miserable than they are now – after all, preventing them from getting any halfway-decent job, home, any chance at a relationship, or any real future at all, isn’t enough. We need to throw them behind bars to rot for the rest of their evil lives – or better yet, fry ’em all.

After all, we wouldn’t want teh children to be exposed to such soulless mind-corrupting evil as peeing in public, or other kids consummating their love. Nah – that’d be horrible.

(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)