INTRODUCTORY POINTS

Let me repeat what I said in the caption to the Blog: I can’t shake the sense that the sex-offense mania – and the matrix of laws that are still growing around it – constitute a serious symptom of a profound falling-away from Constitutional maturity in the government and in the citizenry. That’s my primary concern here. As so often, the media focus stays on the vivid surfaces and immediate excitements of something that is actually of a much wider and deeper and larger significance.

So what I want to do is to look at the whole thing with a focus that goes beyond the surfaces.
I believe that this has been a hugely significant development in the country and for the country during the past few decades, especially in the past 15 years or so. And not at all good.

Let me say this right now, and it will hold for everything I write: I hold no brief for any human being imposing unwanted or inappropriate sexual activity upon another human being. If I point out grave shortcomings and dangers in this entire phenomenon and its ‘mania law’, I am in no way attempting to imply that the imposition of unwanted sexual activity on another person is ‘good’ or desirable. Nor am I attempting to infer that a person who genuinely perpetrates such activity is not guilty of such a transgression.

I completely agree that to be on the receiving end of such a perpetration can be a painful experience and I do not make light of such pain.

I say this at the outset because in the examination of all such mania-phenomenon it is true by definition that certain reasonable and logical elements have been downgraded and even overrun, while other elements have been greatly exaggerated. In order to restore a balance of reason, it will be necessary to examine some of those exaggerations; and while the mania still exists, it may seem that such an examination is itself some form of disrespect or ‘minimizing’ – as the therapists like to say – of an exaggerated element.

This is the occupational hazard of examining manias while they are still active.

But I believe that this particular mania constitutes such a profound danger to this country and this people and to the entire essential American constitutional vision, that it has to be examined now rather than later – by which time too much damage may have been done and a reasonably sufficient recovery of balance and maturity may be impossible.

Let me also say at the outset that I am not technologically gifted, so there won’t be too many bells, whistles, or even the most up-to-date conveniences on this blog.

There are many other blogs that do an excellent job of collecting current news articles. The site Constitutional Fights here on blogspot – and all of the links to other sites that it lists – is an excellent focus point for keeping up with news, group activities, stories and reports, as well as studies and statistics. Another site, linked to Constitutional Fights, is Reform Sex Offender Laws, which also now has its own e-zine.

These sites are excellent, indispensable resources, and what I am doing here is merely intended as a complement to them, an opportunity to look a bit more deeply at certain aspects of the sex-offense phenomenon. My Posts are intended to give you an opportunity to look at matters, and your thoughts can then take you where they will.

In that sense I am not directly seeking to mobilize you or move you in a certain direction by arousing emotion. I am a firm believer that once a person has begun thinking about a subject he or she thinks is worth the effort, then a vital process has been begun, and that’s my objective.

I do a great deal of reading. I will always be careful to employ facts as best I know them. When necessary I will provide a reference note after the text or a hyperlink, although I don’t have a staff so I can’t always recall exactly where and when I read something. And I do not subscribe at all to an ‘advocacy’ approach to writing, i.e. that in my ‘good’ cause then it’s OK to tell my readers anything so long as I get them excited about the cause and dedicated to it. Truth and accuracy are essential, and you cannot ‘baptize’ an untruth or an inaccuracy by telling yourself that it’s all in a good cause. That’s how these manias get started in the first place. That’s their seductiveness.

Truth and accuracy – as best they can be achieved – are still the only way to go.