Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Virginia To Investigate Matriculators As Deviants
In the commonwealth where Patrick Henry intoned, “Give me liberty or give me death” there is considerably less liberty to die for.
A Virginia law is requiring colleges and universities in the Old Dominion to hand over the names and social security numbers of students to be checked against the jurisdiction’s sex offender registry.
While one can understand the need to keep the perverts away from little children, why does the state need to know if these sickos are enrolled in higher education?
After all, the majority of those enrolled in these institutions are of the age of majority and are free to decide for themselves with whom they want to have conjugal relations as we are told ad nauseam by those on college campuses dishing out the condoms and scrawling in chalk all over the sidewalks just how much they love their privates.
If those engaged in these kinds of acts are so bad that authorities have a vested interest in keeping track of their whereabouts (as it is argued), why aren’t they locked away with the key thrown away?
Chief sponsor of the bill Kenneth W. Stolle told the Washington Post, “I’ve got two kids in college right now. You’re going to have a . . . hard time explaining to me why my daughter is living next door to a sexual offender. My guess is every parent out there would have the same expectation that I do.”
Maybe if college-aged women dressed a bit more modestly and didn’t drink like fish, the vast majority would not have to worry all that much about these libidinous males; for while many on the list are violent from whom the innocent should be protected, since this rogues gallery of wandering hands now includes the non-violent, many are themselves now simply victims of “he said, she said†where the so-called lady had second thoughts because the fellow saw no need to send flowers the next day since what he wanted had already been so freely given.
Proponents of the law will argue that the law will inform administrators of potential offenders roaming their campuses. But is this about keeping the disturbed in check or simply yet another excuse to pry into the lives of average Americans?
For if one is by nature prurient and obsessed with doing prurient things, why would one knowingly place oneself on the radar screen of those charged with overseeing the safety of those one desires to prey upon? One would simply roam the campus without enrolling as a student; how does vetting students’ social security numbers (itself a questionable legal usage of these numerical identifiers) solve your problem there?
We could protect society from the sexually deviant by conducting raids from house to house and hold random ID checks on the streets. Maybe we should get public officials on record where they stand on such invasions of privacy and why they are appreciably different than having the various children of the Beast in the form of the different government agencies and institutions transferring vast amounts of personal data back and form between one another.
Those not enrolled in tertiary education thinking this does not involve them are in for a bit of a surprise; for this same legislation also requires that whenever a Virginia resident applies for a license or change of address their name will also be checked against the registry.
Unwilling to admit the existence of sin, personal guilt for these moral offenses has been diminished by reclassifying these misdeeds as behavioral disorders. So instead of making the errant shameful over what they have done, we rewrite the law so that we are all suspects standing in a single nationwide lineup.
By Frederick Meekins
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Stumble It!
June 30th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Dear Fred:
“Maybe if college-aged women dressed a bit more modestly and didn’t drink like fish, the vast majority would not have to worry all that much about these libidinous males; for while many on the list are violent from whom the innocent should be protected, since this rogues gallery of wandering hands now includes the non-violent, many are themselves now simply victims of “he said, she said†where the so-called lady had second thoughts because the fellow saw no need to send flowers the next day since what he wanted had already been so freely given.”
Honestly, it takes me several reads to figure out what you’re saying in a sentence… especially when it is 95 words long.
A few periods may come in handy.
By the way, I agree with you premise… once I found the premise, that is.
July 1st, 2006 at 7:36 am
Truly MND needs an editor – not a fill-in.
Signed,
Mike
The Editor Premeritus
July 1st, 2006 at 8:51 am
Can you say U S constitution. One of the basic tenents of the constitution is the individual right to privacy. These people have got the warped belief that if they feel fear then that right to privacy goes out the window.
Living in a police state may be safe for all the “sheeple” out there, but people like me who value rights, especially the right to privacy could not live that way.
I think maybe it time to start teaching the US constitution again, try and make these ” sheeple” understand that living in freedom some times has dangers involves, but it is far superior to living in tyranny. I won’t give up not one freedom for safety.
July 1st, 2006 at 10:49 am
I’m 100% in agreement with Robert Stevens above, that trading freedoms for an imagined safety is a fool’s bargain.
It’s perhaps worth considering that our President at the onset of World War II, F.D.R., reassured the nation by stating that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
This was a President facing an actual war, an actual enemy, and actual devastation.
Not a fantasy “War on Terror.”
(BTW — terror is a tactic, not an enemy one can identify and eliminate. Bush never seems to get around to understanding that both the Good Guys and the Bad Guys use TERROR! You cannot wage a war against a tactic….)
Contrast F.D.R.’s mentality of confidence with the faux-macho “mission accomplished” eunuchs in the current bipartisan Permanent War Party who seek at every opportunity to inculcate maximum fear and insecurity in the people everywhere.
Why, just this week, we were shocked and awed to learn that a bunch of dope-smoking rastafarians in Miami who were planning to blow up the Sears Tower were caught through excellent intel, (yeah, mon…) and charged with conspiring to make war against the United States!
Meanwhile, 47,000 illegal immigrants waltzed across the open border.
The marketing of FEAR has become the modus operandi of the Rove-Bush-Hillary-Biden cabal.
How reassuring that we have not been attacked again since 9/11?
(Or, maybe the attack strategy has evolved from the primitively physical to the more elegant mass psychological?)
July 2nd, 2006 at 3:43 am
Our founding fathers said that those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom or security.
Nuff said. I appreciate so much just how forward-thinking our founding fathers were every day. Everyone should read about them and their writings, it’s not only educational but truly awe-inspiring.
July 2nd, 2006 at 6:19 am
Not a fantasy “War on Terror.â€
You need to get out of your little fantasy world. You can call it whatever you want, but these people want us dead. And the libs are doing their best to help them, as if they would be the “protected” class when the islamo-fascists take over. It’s working so well for the French.
July 2nd, 2006 at 11:40 am
The marketing of FEAR has become the modus operandi of the Rove-Bush-Hillary-Biden cabal.
Good point, but I think it predates all of them, except maybe Biden. On the one hand, we have government undermining the fabric of society, the family, then they claim they must protect us from all of the social misfits they have manufactured. Joe Biden is husband and father to millions of American women and children, and now we must relinquish freedom in order to protect us from the masses of deviants he is raising. Ironically, for any innocent citizen whose biggest fear is not government, they don’t understand much about the founding fathers.
July 2nd, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Hal admonished — “Not a fantasy ‘War on Terror.’ You need to get out of your little fantasy world.”
Technically, Hal is correct.
Because there is no recognized War on Terror.(Hence none to be dismissed as a “fantasy.”)
For the United States to be legally at war, it requires the Congress to declare it.
That has not happened.
Logically, in fact, not fantasy, there is no actual War on Terror.
The Shrub in the west wing has a track record of irritability with details and anything smacking of a more than five-minute’s analysis.
It’s questionable whether a person with such a combination of hubris, ADHD, dry-drunk syndrome, and too many yes-men at his beck and call is capable of learning.
The charitable view would be that he’s just a victim of his victimhood at the hands of the actual power-brokers.
Not to suggest that puppets can’t appear powerful.
The polls suggest the public is seeing an emperor without clothes. Strings and all.
July 3rd, 2006 at 4:43 am
The Shrub in the west wing has a track record of irritability with details and anything smacking of a more than five-minute’s analysis.
He’s kept us from getting hit again, or hadn’t you noticed? I guess “DUH” magazine has a liberal bent, eh?