Total Pageviews

Friday, April 13, 2012

How Sex Offender Registries Fail Us

From REASON.tv  http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/14/reasontv-how-sex-offender-registries-fai

Reason.tv: How Sex Offender Registries Fail Us

Click link above for video


You can be put on the sex offender registry for urinating in public, having consensual sex as a teenager or even for “sexting.”And in California, once you are on the list, you are on it for life.
The registry has become the medieval stocks of the 21st century and, as attorney Janice Bellucci says, once someone is on the registry, "he is treated like a leper".
There are violent sexual predators who should be on the registry for life, but 95% of those on the registry never commit another sex offense, according to the California Department of Corrections.
Reason.tv spoke to a registrant ruined by the registry. His crime: having sex with his teenage girlfriend.
“It was actually illegal for me to be anywhere near her for three years,” he says, “but she waited for me. And I waited, too.”
They are still married today, 10 years after he was convicted.
Harsher laws for registrants continue to be passed while proposed reforms to the registry have struggled to gain ground.
California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano introduced a bill for a tiered registry in January, but it was defeated thanks to opponent's scare tactics.
"There have always been stories, especially this summer, about child predators in the area," says Mission Viejo Councilwoman Cathy Schlicht, who introduced a bill banning sex offenders from public parks and beaches.
Bellucci is going to keep fighting for reform. “We’re not thinking from a logical and rational place,” she says, “instead we are acting from fear."

Produced by Tracy Oppenheimer. Shot by Paul Detrick, Zach Weissmueller and Sharif Matar.

Sex Panic and the Punitive State

From: Monthly Review  http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/first-they-came-for-the-sex-offenders
First, They Came for the Sex Offenders
Judith Levine is the author of four books, including Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Women From Sex, which won the LA Times Book Prize. She also writes a biweekly column called “Poli Psy,” about emotions in politics, for the Vermont alternative newspaper Seven Days. She lives in Brooklyn and northeastern Vermont.
Roger N. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (University of California Press, 2011), 328 pages, $24.95, paperback.
In California Governor Jerry Brown signs a law prohibiting registered sex offenders from offering their homes as polling places. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Assemblyman (and former LAPD officer) Stephen Knight, says the legislation is necessary to protect high-school volunteers and children accompanying their parents on Election Day.
In Vermont a $13.8 million network of twenty-eight communications towers and eight “public safety answering points” is under construction to aid first responders in case of a terrorist attack. Homeland Security, which is funding the project, has granted Vermont—population: 620,000; state crime ranking: forty-nine—more than $90 million since 2001.
In New York a maverick group of psychologists and urban designers are agitating to bring back the old monkey bars and asphalt surfaces of playgrounds, which were abolished because of perceived risks of accidents and lasting psychological trauma. Sixty pages of federal playground regulations now advise, among other precautions, against children wearing drawstring sweatshirts and “mittens connected by strings through the arms.” Write the psychologists: “Paradoxically, our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
How are these items—collected at random during one week in 2011—related?
The answers can be found in Roger N. Lancaster’s Sex Panic and the Punitive State, a riveting history and virtuosic analysis of the way America’s thirty-year panic about child sexual abuse has fueled an ever-increasing appetite to “protect, punish, and preempt” crime and has served as the model for the creation of “something resembling a police state” in the United States.
Lancaster, a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, says that in the process the criminal justice ethos has been transformed. Today, “the protection of innocence trumps the presumption of innocence,” the victim’s “rights” to comfort and “closure” elbow out the constitutional rights of the accused or convicted, and a lust for punishment has supplanted a faith in rehabilitation.
Our civil and private institutions have become arms of the police and the vice squad. Public schools have students arrested for what used to be considered childish pranks. Public-housing authorities conduct unwarranted searches and evict entire families for the legal infractions of one member. Employee background checks, drug testing of food stamp recipients, voter ID requirements—such practices enact what Lancaster calls the “preemptive paranoid approach” to governance. Even art institutions, once redoubts of calm in a phobic world, now routinely warn audiences that an exhibition may be “inappropriate” for children.
Communities that tolerated a measure of deviance in the spirit of democracy and individual freedom now bond in the solidarity of paranoia and vengeance. The nation girds itself against alien invaders on its borders and at its airports.
And over it all, superimposed on the Stars and Stripes since 9/11, floats the image of America—not just its children—as vulnerable, victimized, and innocent.
“Social Death”
The American carceral state imprisons an unprecedented number of its citizens: with 5 percent of the world’s people, the United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, leading all other nations in both percentage and raw numbers. On the other side of the bars, one in four-to-five American workers is engaged in private security or other “guard labor.” This “penal Keynsianism,” comments Lancaster, “solves two economic problems: it creates jobs while guarding the unemployed.”
Sex offenders constitute a relatively small proportion of people under the thumb of the criminal justice system. But the harshness of their punishment and the disregard of their rights lie outside the Pale even in an extraordinarily harsh system. And in a nation famous for second chances, sex offenders are uniquely bereft of the opportunity to discharge their debt to society, repent of their transgressions, and start anew.
Inmates convicted of offenses such as consensual sex with a minor (statutory rape) or possession of child pornography (which can be pictures of teenagers under eighteen) may serve terms longer than those who have assaulted or even killed a child. At the end of their sentences, sex offenders may be locked up in psychiatric civil commitment, based on psychologists’ inconsistent and unscientific predictions of future offense, with no certain date of release.
There are currently more than 705,000 people on sex offender registries in the United States, with more added weekly. These registrants include everyone from sadistic rapists to people who have urinated twice on a tree; the information on the registries makes it hard to distinguish one from the other. Almost ritually, every session both Republican and Democratic legislators enact tougher sentences and more diabolical restrictions on the residency, work, and freedom of movement of former offenders. For obvious political reasons, repeal is never on the agenda.
Violation of these stringent terms is practically inevitable, and a large number, perhaps the majority, of sex offenders who end up back in prison do so for minor infractions like failing to report the purchase of a car. Whereas parole and probation once aimed to smooth the transition from inmate to civilian, these policies do the opposite: they commonly result in homelessness and joblessness, political disenfranchisement, exclusion from higher education and military service, and even from houses of worship.
Former sex offenders and their families live under constant harassment and threat of vigilante violence; some have been murdered. Lancaster notes that during Hurricane Katrina, when certain New Orleanians were helped to evacuate and even the poorest were at least warehoused, only sex offenders were left to fend for themselves. “The classification of sex offenders as unfit for rescue” along with the special laws driving them from the community “reenact the logic of ‘social death,’” he says. Social death is the term Orlando Patterson used to describe slavery.
Civil libertarians have challenged these policies as double jeopardy, preventive detention, and a violation of the centuries-old principle of habeas corpus. But the courts have consistently upheld them as administrative, not punitive, measures—therefore constitutional. The federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, appears to consider no punishment of a sex offender excessively cruel or unusual.
A decade’s worth of research has found that such restrictions enhance public safely not a whit. But, as Lancaster shows, “preventive governance” is not a rational response to actual crime, which has been declining for decades. In fact, contrary to police claims and public perception—stoked by such shows as Law & Order SVU and To Catch a Predator—sex offenders have extraordinarily low rates of recidivism for sexual offenses. Advocates of the registries attribute the low rates, and drops in crime generally, to increased incarceration and post-prison surveillance. Opponents claim that the restrictions are so stressful that registrants are more likely to offend again. Recent research challenges both camps: a careful analysis of several data sets by Amanda Y. Agan at the University of Chicago finds that sex offender registration neither increases nor decreases the likelihood of reoffense. The article is subtitled “Fear Without Function?”1
But data have no effect. Indeed, the model of sex offender registries has only spread to other areas of the law. Several states have proposed or set up public registries of people convicted of DWI and domestic violence, and, in Florida, of all released prisoners—all to minimize “risk.”
In an era where parents are afraid to let their children play outside—or fortify them with helmets and cell phones whenever they do—“risk assessment” is a growing discipline, which looks like science. It is in fact symbolic: the actuarial encoding of hyperbolic public apprehension, ever on the uptrend. Phil Taylor, a former Texas-certified sex offender therapist, told me that “sex offender ‘management’ is done like business management”: the state calculates its potential profits (including political ones) and losses and structures its policing bureaucracies accordingly. Never mind that what shows up in the debit column are the civil and human rights of people once called U.S. citizens.
The White Molester
Among this country’s unprecedented legions of inmates and parolees, people of color are vastly disproportionate. For example, the percentage of young African-American men in prison is higher than it was in the Jim Crow South, when prisoners were leased out as slave labor.
Yet sex offenders are white—not only on the prison rolls but also in the public imagination. Why is this so and how did it come to be? It is a puzzle that critics of the penal state have not solved—and rarely approach. The facts are simply too hard to square with the usually correct view that the carceral state is the latest iteration of a systemic repression of black and brown people.
So this is probably the most valuable and original contribution of Sex Panic: Lancaster’s treatment of the “racing” and “queering” of the sex offender and its effect on what now masquerades as civic solidarity.
Since the start of U.S. history, the myth of the black (and Native American) rapist of white women has justified slavery, lynching, and the hyper-policing of communities of color; Lancaster glosses this well-known portion of the brutal story. But it is the emotions and ideologies, and resultant laws and practices, from the mid-twentieth century to the present that he maps with particular subtlety, moving from lynch laws—used against black men accused of raping white women—to “sexual psychopath” laws, which “de-raced” (or, rather, “re-raced,” as white) the molester.
From the Depression to the McCarthy Era, the image of the child-molester had morphed from an unemployed man plagued by feelings of impaired masculinity to a homosexual, naturally hungry for young flesh, his deviance portrayed as both congenital and contagious. The child molester of the 1950s has been supplanted by the “pedophile,” a word that is now used indiscriminately for people who sexually desire prepubescent children and those (like the entire advertising industry, you might say, and by extension, the rest of us) who find teenagers sexy. Although the child molester is no longer explicitly described as homosexual, homosexuality makes a suspect person even more suspect. In fact, the Static-99, widely used to assess risk of sex-crime reoffense, lists “any male victims” as a risk factor. Still, as homosexuality is normalized, today’s “pedophile” is thrust, by gay rights and straight sexual freedom groups alike, even further to the margins of queerness. Lancaster calls it the “offloading of queerness.”
What happened to the bestial black male whose image shadowed white America’s nightmares? The 1960s law-and-order mania resurrected him for a time, and he appeared again in the 1980s, embodied with particular viciousness in the five black teenagers convicted—falsely, it turned out—of raping the Central Park jogger in 1989. Interestingly the term predator—coined in that decade to describe a species of remorseless black teenage criminals—migrated to the discourse of sexual terror, as the figure of the inscrutable, naturally evil black rapist shifted sideways to make room for the incurably sick, assumedly white, child-desiring queer.
Of course racism is not vanquished; whiteness is doing its work. “Shall we say, then, that in a society committed both to a war on crime (with its mass incarceration of black men) and to ridding itself of racism (through formal adherence to a regime of civil rights) the feared figure of the white pedophile is necessary?” Lancaster writes. “Perhaps part of the psychic work he performs is to absolve the guilty conscience of racism at a time when so many other fears are focused on the black gangbanger and brown border menace.”
The child molester is real; he does harm, Lancaster concedes. But so monstrous is he in America’s imagination that he must be understood as symbolic—and, by now, central to the nation’s understanding of its moral self. As the crime scene moves from the inner city to the suburb, from the “pathological” female-headed black family of the 1965 Moynihan Report to the white, heterosexual, middle-class family and from the purview of the welfare office and the juvenile detention center to the privatized surveillance of the PTA and the neighborhood watch, “overt references to the racial origins of [national] norms can be progressively erased,” Lancaster writes.
Whiteness and straightness may not even be the right words anymore for the type of rectitude that is staged in moral panic.” To secure a place in the idealized American moral community—even in the radically dehumanized precincts of the supermax prison—all you need to do is bash a pervert.
Politics and Perversion
This moral panic has been going on for nearly a century, interrupted by one brief decade. It is protean: in the last three decades alone, it has metamorphosed from outsized estimates of incest to belief in covens of Satanic abusers to the government’s claim of a massive global traffic in child porn—which can be neither substantiated nor refuted, since the public and the press are prohibited from viewing the images.
And, while false accusations of garden-variety child abuse continue unabated, the popular suspicion of adult malevolence toward children has spilled beyond sex. A young mother whose breast milk is insufficient is charged for the death of her starved baby. A father whose children are consumed in a fire is executed for their arson-murder.
Meanwhile, as Lancaster shows, the stain of “sex crime” is spreading into every discourse of danger. In some states, drunk drivers have been renamed “abusive” drivers. On the arm of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, the world “RAPEIST” [sic] was scrawled in magic marker. The federal government’s tentacles of surveillance—Homeland Security and Immigrations & Customs Enforcement, or ICE—reach equally toward “terrorists,” illegal “aliens,” and men who masturbate to images of 15-year-old boys. “Victims of Human Trafficking”—largely defined as coerced prostitution, though forced domestic and industrial labor are far more common—are welcomed at the borders while economic refugees and political torture survivors are turned away.
It is not only the repressive right that got us to this juncture. The left and feminism have done their part, too. Lancaster points out that the left’s “fixation on injury” is balanced in more expansive times by a politics of liberation. But these are not expansive times. Even social service and economic justice advocates who understand the systemic causes of people’s troubles are nonetheless hunkered down defending the statutory protection of favored constituencies defined by harm. Mainstream feminists, obsessed with sexual victimhood, have formed tight alliances with moral conservatives and the paternalistic and racist forces of law and order (anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminists can be thanked for those distortions in the granting of refugee status).
Given the feeling of scarcity all around, perhaps it is not surprising that progressives have not critiqued the industry of support for crime victims—“a distorted little welfare state in the middle of savage capitalism”—while social services are slashed for everyone else.
Why should progressives have sympathy for these devils? Some sex offenders have committed heinous crimes. But so have the people on death row on whose behalf The Nation editorializes and the Quakers vigil. Even the guilty deserve justice.
Roger Lancaster was moved to write Sex Panic when his friend, a gay teacher, was entangled in a false accusation of sexual abuse. One item of evidence: he invited Lancaster, who is also gay, along on a school trip. I sometimes think the panic will end only when every American knows someone whose life has been destroyed by it.
Perhaps this book will hasten that day. With reasoned urgency and stirring intelligence Sex Panic makes palpable the injury this hysteria is inflicting, not only on people accused of sex crimes, but on democracy and freedom themselves.

CA RSOL Meeting

California RSOL will return to Los Angeles on April 21 for a regular monthly meeting.

The meeting will begin at 10 a.m. and be held at the ACLU Building, 1313 W. 8th Street, Los Angeles.

The meeting is open to registrants, family members and supporters only.

The meeting will include presentations by attorneys, pscyhologists and registrants who have successfully challenged residency restrictions and parole conditions.

There is no charge to attend the meeting.

For additional information, call (805) 896-7854.

Torturing CA's Homeless SO's


TORTURING AUBURN’S HOMELESS SEX OFFENDERS - A GREAT IDEA?


This is the fourteenth article in a series of articles written to promote the April 14th, 2012, charity showing of local film maker and Placer High School Graduate Ryan Frew’s documentary film about the homeless in Auburn, called, “Life is Mandatory.” The film will be shown at the State Theater in Auburn. The funds raised will be used to assist Auburn Area Homeless People. Written by local attorney, author, and Instructor at Sierra College, Bob Litchfield.

There will be no photographs of the two men I interviewed to write this article.
Nor will I publish their real names.
I made this decision to protect these homeless men, as they walk around Auburn.
We’ll call one of them Jack, and the other one Ernie.
Jack is a tall, Caucasian male, a bit on the pudgy side, wearing glasses, and looking a lot like your average businessman. He walks with a cane, because of a bad knee. His clothing is clean, and his personal appearance is much neater than that of most other homeless men I have met.
His friend, Ernie, is also very clean. Ernie is a fairly short, stocky black man. He is a good speaker. He also walks with a cane.
I was searching for homeless women or families to interview when I ran into Jack and Ernie. They heard that I was interviewing homeless people, and they sought me out. They are hoping that someone will advocate for their unique, and dire situation.
Jack and Ernie both wear ankle monitors. Both of them have recently been released from prison, and both are registered sex offenders... what they call “290 offenders.”
They are both homeless because our laws made them that way.
Both men were dumped here in Placer County on parole, after they got out of prison for sex offenses.
Neither one of them have any family or friends here.
They have no prospects of employment here.
Nor is there any shelter of any kind in this area that will take them in. Even the local Christian Program, The Gathering In, will not take them, because they are registered sex offenders.
But the conditions of Jack’s and Ernie’s parole require that they both stay here in the Auburn area for the next three to four years.
During all of that time, both men must wear an ankle monitor, which must be plugged in and recharged every day.
But these men do not have any home, any shelter, or even any place where they can go to plug in their ankle monitors to re-charge them.
Ernie says that this places the men in a position where they are forced by the justice system of break the law again, because one of the only ways that they can get their ankle monitors re-charged is to sneak into some commercial establishment and plug in, thereby committing the crime of stealing electricity (potentially a commercial burglary).
Jack is a tile setter by trade, and is originally from Arizona. He was here in Auburn when he committed his offense. But he would like to go back to Arizona, to be near his family. But the prison system dumped him here to serve his four years of parole. There is a program where the States of California and Arizona can swap former prisoners on parole, but Jack wasn’t even told where he was going to be paroled until he was freed.
Ernie used to work as a Chef at a restaurant in the Grand Canyon. He was in Modesto when he committed his offense. He was dumped here in Placer County to serve his parole because of a new law that requires sex offenders to be paroled a certain distance away from their victims.
I should point out that not everyone you might encounter in the Auburn area who is wearing an ankle monitor is a sex offender or a movie star. The justice system now uses ankle bracelets to monitor a lot of different kinds of offenders, because it is cheaper than feeding them in jail.
Jack and Ernie will have to wear their ankle bracelets all day, every day, for the next three or four years. It is possible to shower with the ankle monitor on, but the device cannot be submerged. Which means that for the next four years, neither one of these two men will ever be able to go for a swim, or to get into a bath.
Both men are on pain medications, which they are able to get from county health, and both are also on psychiatric medications.
The fact that they were homeless men adrift in Auburn, and that they are on psychiatric medications worried me a great deal, at first. Because I have been told by other local experts on homelessness that the homeless people in the Auburn area who are on psychiatric medications are only able to get examined and get their psychiatric medications adjusted once every six months.
But the medication situation for homeless sex offenders is not quite that perilous.
One of the men tells me that his psychiatric medication is for depression. He also tells me that they do not get their psychiatric medications through county health, but rather, through their parole officers and the parole system. Through the parole system, they are able to get their medications checked once every two months.
Jack was in prison for twelve years. Ernie was in prison for a little over five years.
Jack has been here in Auburn, homeless, for about two months. Ernie has been here, homeless, for about a year now.
Jack described his arrival in Auburn, and their current situation. “I arrived in Auburn, and by the time that they processed me out of the jail, it was about 3:00 P.M. They put on my ankle monitor and told me that it had to be recharged every day. They gave me $200, and told me to go to the County Welcome Center, which is one of the only places in Auburn where there are services available for homeless people.
“But the Welcome Center closes at 4:00 P.M. So, I got there just barely in time to find out anything. I didn’t know where I could go to get shelter, where I could go to get food. I didn’t even know where I could go to re-charge my ankle bracelet.
“I was at least able to get a sleeping bag. And someone told me about a relatively safe spot where I could sleep outside for the night. So, I slept outside that first night.
“The next day, I ran into Ernie, and he showed me some of the ropes with regard to how to survive on the streets as a homeless registered sex offender.”
Jack and Ernie usually do not camp anywhere near the other homeless men, because neither one of them do drugs or alcohol, and they do not want to be near the problems caused by drugs and alcohol. But they do have to camp outside every day, because there is no shelter, anywhere in Placer County, that will take in a registered sex offender.
Nor is there any campground, nor any piece of ground, anywhere in the Auburn area, where it is permissible for homeless people to camp. So, homeless people are forced to sneak around and camp at any remote location where they can get away with it, until the police come and roust them out of that spot, and they move somewhere else.
Ankle monitors or not, this wandering camping life does not strike me as a very good way to monitor registered sex offenders.
Jack says that he is disabled, because of his knee and back injuries. But he is not receiving disability. He is in the process of making application for disability. But in the mean time, he has no income at all.
Ernie has peripheral artery disease in his right leg, and has had two stints put in. He applied for disability, but his claim was rejected. Right now, he is attempting to appeal his disability claim. Until then, he is homeless and without income. He sleeps outside, on the ground, every night, in a tent, with two stints in his leg.
I ask Jack what message he would like to send to the world.
Jack says, “Get to know a person before you judge them for their past, because people do change.” Earlier, Jack had assured me that he was not the same person as the man who went to prison twelve years earlier.
I want to believe him. But I have heard all of the same news stories, television stories, and propaganda that you have heard, to the effect that sex offenders, particularly sexual predators, never really change, and that they will be repeat offenders for life.
I ask Jack what his response is to that general belief.
Jack tells me that those sex offenders whom you see walking free on the streets are very unlikely to be repeat offenders.
He says that before he was released, he had to be examined and pass written reports made by four different psychiatrists.
He says that sex offenders who cannot pass that kind of rigorous testing simply no longer get released. He says that this is especially true after the Garrido case.
Who can say for sure how accurate that information is?
Certainly not me.
But I do know that the registered sex offender list has been grossly abused by our justice system, and that there are men on the registered sex offender list who have nothing whatsoever to do with being sexual predators, and that those men’s lives are ruined.
Should a twenty-year-old boy who slept with his seventeen-year-old girlfriend be registered on the same list with rapists and child molesters?
Should the youth pastor of a church who gets seduced by a troubled seventeen-year-old girl be registered on the same list with rapists and child molesters?
Should a father who takes a troubled sixteen-year-old foster child into his home, and ends up being seduced by her be on the same list with rapists and child molesters?
Maybe you think so. There is certainly a wide berth for disagreement on these kinds of emotional hot-button issues.
I have been told that a man can end up being placed on the registered sex offender list for just for stopping by the side of the road to urinate, and thereby exposing himself.
If we are going to make registered sex offenders out of every person who has ever committed some form of sexual indiscretion, and put ankle bracelets on them all, then let’s start with one of our past foothills district attorneys, or two or three of our local judges, or maybe the state legislators who used to sit with lobbyists at the bar in downtown Sacramento where the legislators were encouraged to pick out the prostitutes they liked from those swimming nude in the glass-walled swimming pool behind the bar... services happily paid for by the lobbyists.
Legislators aside, I have known many a good man and good woman during my lifetime who had his or her life ruined by a moment of sexual indiscretion. But we did not register all of them as sex offenders.
Back when we were kids in school, we were taught how barbaric it was that our Puritan ancestors would force an adulteress to wear a large scarlet letter “A” on her clothing.
We were also taught, and saw in our annual viewing of the movie about Moses, that it was barbaric to create a class of people who were outcasts from society because they were afflicted with leprosy.
We were taught that it was barbaric, and totally un-American for people in India to separate themselves into a caste system that included one class of people who were called the “untouchables.”
But now, when vengeance and punishment and sex is involved, Americans don’t seem to have any problem at all with creating a group of Americans whom we shall call “registered sex offenders,” and who shall be treated as outcasts, lepers, untouchables, and who shall wear the scarlet letter of the ankle monitor, and whose names shall be posted on the internet.
Do I exaggerate about these people being outcasts and untouchables?
Jack and Ernie tell me that there is not one single shelter in Placer County that will take them in, even for one night.
And remember that they are not permitted to leave Placer County.
They do not have a place to plug in their ankle monitors, which must be recharged every day.
Even if Jack and Ernie did have any money, which they do not, there is only one place that they know of, in all of Placer County, that is even willing to rent a room to them.
The cost of renting a room at that one place is $500 per person per month.
If Jack or Ernie ever do succeed in getting disability payments, those payments will be about $900 a month. So, more than half of their income would go to rent a room at the one place in Placer County that is willing to rent them a room.
In the mean time, they sleep in a tent... even on a cold day when the rain is pouring down in buckets, like it is today.
Last night, as I lay in my warm, dry bed, the rain beat down on the roof of my home like a constant drumming. I could not sleep. I laid there, thinking about the fact that Jack and Ernie were out there, somewhere, trying to sleep in a soggy tent.
There was no room at the Inn for them. There was not even an Inn available that would accept them.
We created this situation, with our own, well-intentioned laws.
But if we were to leave our dogs, our horses, or even our livestock out in weather like this with no shelter whatsoever, someone from the humane society or animal control would probably have us arrested.
We treat our dogs and our livestock better than we treat these human beings whom we have labeled as “registered sex offenders.”
Maybe, like me, you are one of those vindictive people who are thinking, or who have thought at some time or other in the past, “Good. Let these registered sex offenders suffer. Let’s punish them even more. They are not human beings like us. They are animals.”
Well, fine.
You can explain that kind of no-mercy reasoning to Jesus, when you finally meet Him face-to-face.
But in the mean time, I think that what we need here are a few, extraordinary Christians who have enough grace to get together and figure out some safe way that we can get Auburn’s homeless registered sex offenders some shelter from the rain.
This is a problem that is too big, and too complicated, for one person to solve by himself.