DOE v PORITZ 1 B

DOE v PORITZ 1 B

(This is the second and concluding Post examing Section 1 of the Decision. The text of the Decision is here. Subsequent sections will not always require such long Posts, although I will do a longer Post rather than pass over relevant material.)

The Court continues its explanations in support of “The legislative purpose: addressing the problem of repetitive sex offenders”. It is here that we must pay careful attention, because these are the reasons given for the whole ‘emergency’ and this entire program of registration and notification.

“The challenged laws before us in this case have two basic provisions. First, they require registration with law enforcement authorities of certain convicted sex offenders and spell out offenses that trigger the registration requirement, registration of those convicted prior to their passage limited to offenders found to have repetitive and compulsive characteristics. Second, they provide for notice of the presence by the likelihood that such offenders will commit another sex offense, where the risk of such reoffense is low, only law enforcement authorities are notified; where it is moderate, institutions and organizations having the responsibility to care for and supervise children and women are notified; and where the risk is high, those members of the public likely to encounter the offender are notified.”

Note that the laws were challenged almost immediately, a pattern that was sustained in every State and in every jurisdiction that adopted them (which, ominously, was all of the States – in itself another warning sign of mania).

The “certain” is almost duplicitous; the list has grown to include crimes with only a modest connection to sex, and to include crimes of violence against children that do not include sex at all.

The “retroactive” element is claimed to be – and shrewdly pointed out to be – “limited” to offenders “found to have repetitive and compulsive characteristics”. Yet it is also “found” that almost all sex offenders have at least the potential for reoffense, so they can all be retroactively registered.

It also has to be noted that in 1995 there is almost no genuine research and ‘science’ underlying any of this newly-constructed ‘sex offense’ psychology. The entire scheme was put together with almost no ‘scientific’ grounding; the legislative idea was apparently to build the thing first and get ‘science’ that would support it afterward. Which, if true, casts some light on the political – rather than scientific – nature of the scheme.

And “repetitive” and “compulsive” will come to be defined verrrry loosely indeed: if there is even the purely logical possibility that a person might commit a second sexual offense (also broadly defined) then that constitutes a “repetitive” and “compulsive” element that falls within the scope of the law.

Here I sense echoes of that radical feminist assertion, current and popular back then, that “sex” itself is nothing but a ‘male’ madness that ‘men’ use to ‘oppress’ women and sustain ‘patriarchy’. The fact that a mostly male Legislature – and in all the States and Congress – would pass this so quickly is another darkly curious characteristic of these laws – as if the pols were eager to placate women.

And of course, these laws come just a year after the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act which set up the ‘registration’ of Domestic Violence (now incredibly broadly defined to include ‘silence’ and ‘not speaking to’ somebody in the domestic setting) offenders and the equally dubious ‘instant Restraining Order’ which can be issued by a court on the word of one person … which is the dynamic of ‘delation’ in which any right-thinking citizen of a police state can make a ‘report’ to the police that will trigger immediate police action against the person about whom the report is made. The Nazis made wide use of it as a ‘terror’ tactic to help cow target populations. The years of the first Clinton Administration (and here I am not making a Party-politics statement, but merely describing the era) saw both Domestic Violence and sex-offense legislation that bore the marks of totalitarian and police-state ‘terror’ laws.

As a result of such wide (and scientifically ungrounded) definitions, the ‘classification’ structure that follows them is effectively reduced to mere window-dressing: just about everybody convicted of a sex-offense is going to be ‘found’ to be “compulsive and repetitive”.

And again I note that this entire scheme is built, like an upside-down pyramid, on just a few key and crucial conceptual sleights-of-hand, misstatements and outright untruths that create an incredibly wide target population. The subsequent efforts at ‘careful’ construction of Tiers is effectively nothing more than window-dressing to keep up the appearances of legislative care and caution, to which – diabolically – friendly courts can point as evidence of good intention and good law.

“The Legislature finds and declares: a) The danger of recidivism posed by sex offenders and offenders who commit other predatory acts against children, and the dangers posed by persons who prey on others as a result of mental illness, require a system of registration that will permit law enforcement officials to identify and alert the public when necessary for the public safety.” And “b) A system of registration of sex offenders and others who commit predatory acts against children will provide with additional information critical to preventing and promptly resolving incidents involving sexual abuse and missing persons.”

Here in (a) we see the emphasis on “the danger of recidivism” that was already seen in the previous Post as being illogical. Unless, of course, you presume that ‘sex’ is itself a ‘madness’ – and an almost uniquely male one.

“Mental illness” is added – nicely and shrewdly. Of course, if one is “mentally ill” there are State facilities for such illness, but the legislature has to know already that no competent professional psychiatry and psychology (this is before the cottage industry of ‘sex offense therapists’ and ‘experts’ springs up – precisely as a result of these laws) is going to declare enough ‘sex offenders’ to be genuinely ‘mentally ill’, and no State has enough facilities to house and treat them (nor is there any actual diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge of any such ‘sex offense’ mental illness that can be deployed in those facilities).

One detects here as well the underlying presence of the radical feminist assertion that ‘maleness’ is in and of itself ‘madness’, and that ‘patriarchy’ is ‘predatory’ in and of itself. But, shrewdly, “children” are continually pushed to the fore so as to distract from the mentality of the legislation and incite public concern.

And again, although so much ‘mental illness’ among ‘sex offenders’ is mentioned, yet the police will not be arresting them, but merely “alerting the public” because it is “necessary for public safety”. This is curious: the police are known for arresting persons for a crime, not ‘alerting the public’.

But that suggests the true intent of these laws: to create a public mania, even at the risk of inciting not simply the classical vigilantism, but rather to incite a wide and thorough public revulsion. Which which can only result in grossly un-American levels of State-sponsored public attitudes and actions against the target class. And, again most curiously, will wind up creating a groundswell of public revulsion against … ‘men’. Which as I have said is a hallmark of that era of the early and mid 1990s.

When (b) brings up the matter of “missing persons” one is reminded of the “abducted children” hysteria of the late 1970s: all of a sudden in those years, hundreds of thousands of children were claimed to be abducted yearly, and that the highways and byways of the nation were chock-full of abducted children; photographs of missing children began to appear on milk cartons. It all died out quickly enough, especially when the ‘definition’ of abduction was discovered to include kids in divorce proceedings whom one parent had taken, or kids who had run away or teens who had left home for one reason or another, and kids who were simply not around the house and the parents didn’t know where they were.

I point out again how this entire methodology mimics the ‘selling’ of a program or product to the government, especially as seen in the prescription-drug pharmaceutical industry and in the defense industry: overstate the ‘problem’ or the ‘threat’ through manipulation of definitions so as to achieve alarmingly high ‘numbers’, inflate the threat by means of a worst-case scenario, and then quickly claim that your product will ‘solve’ the problem, while in the process presenting the expected effectiveness of your ‘product’ in a wildly best-case scenario.

(I’ll allow myself here a thought about politics: in such marketing of commercial products and programs to the government, the savvy corporation will also ‘spread around’ PAC donations, money. But with the rise of ‘advocacies’, the ‘money’ that the pols would receive is actually political: if a pol supports their program s/he will get to look ‘sensitive’ and ‘concerned’, and like s/he is ‘doing something’. Otherwise, the advocacy – and they quickly became verrrry ‘professional’ and Beltway-savvy – will paint the pol as being ‘insensitive’, un-empathetic, and – as the nature and quality of public discourse rapidly declined – perhaps a ‘supporter’ of the very ‘threat’ and ‘problem’ that the advocates wanted addressed.)

The Court continues with its discourse on the legislative intent of the law: “The legislative concern about the problem, and the remedy selected, are best understood in the light of the nature and extent of the problem. There are varying views on the subject, but it is clear that the Legislature in formulating its policy accepted the view of the problem, and the facts concerning it, that follow. See Footnote 1.”

Here we see that the key and crucial underpinning of this entire scheme is based upon the pols’ SELECTION of certain numbers and statistics from various “studies” conducted. Yet although after 15 years the content of those ‘studies’ has been greatly discredited, and although there was a great deal of conflicting material which was also presented to the pols at the time back in the mid-1990s, they “chose” to go with the most lurid and worst-case material.

This is supported by “Footnote 1” which the Court references. There the Court advises that much of the material that the pols chose was presented in the Brief of the Attorney General of the United States. It immediately goes on to make this admission: “Conflicting studies and interpretations, especially concerning THE PRECISE NUMBERS [emphasis mine] abound, but as noted above, the resolution of the controversy in this area is solely a legislative matter.”

The Attorney General was – if memory serves – Janet Reno, she who authorized the hugely dubious and ultimately catastrophic Waco assault because, she later claimed, she was afraid for the children in the compound and that they might be in danger (they all died in her assault).

There were an abundant number of studies, presented in the Amicus Briefs, that indicated a grave and large professional and scientific disagreement with the worst-case scenarios and incredibly high numbers. This casts more mania-light on the entire legislative process and motivation - and perhaps even competence and treachery. This was a hugely unsettled area of actual knowledge. It was hardly appropriate or wise to erect so dubious a legislative scheme in the face of so much professional disagreement. Yet the pols bulled ahead.

Nor, in the light of subsequent serious research, have the pols now scaled back the entire scheme. Indeed – in another indication of mania law – they are increasing and intensifying the scheme. Which also starts to remind one of Vietnam, where the government simply kept sending in more troops, more weapons, pouring more money and lives into what clearly was a poorly-conceived and unsuccessful strategy.

And the Court absolves itself of any direct responsibility: the selection of Facts and Findings is “solely a legislative matter”. But the scheme built upon those Facts and Findings is and has continued to be from the outset a matter of grave Constitutional import: profound doubts continue to be raised, and not only by ‘perps’ trying to appeal a conviction but by Dissents written by deeply concerned Justices and the occasional significant court Decisions by Judges. The Supreme Court has even had to override some of the State Supreme Courts.

It seems repugnant that a State Supreme Court here blithely declares itself to be powerless in the matter of determining the Constitutionality of a scheme that trails, historically, dark clouds of Nazi and Soviet legislative and criminal-justice practice. But the Court’s own game-plan is to claim that it is powerless to pass on the validity of the Legislature’s Facts and Findings, and since those Facts and Findings are so horrific, then an ‘emergency’ truly exists and the Legislature is justified – as it has always been – in taking extreme steps “for the public safety”. This is the core dynamic of the scheme.

By the way, in Footnote 2 the Court will try to explain away the fact that a person with a first sex-offense conviction still has to register – even retroactively – even though you can hardly claim “repetitive and compulsive” for a first-time offender. Apparently, you don’t have to actually demonstrate in your own conduct any “repetitive and compulsive” behavior; the Legislature, as a result of its Facts and Findings, has already decided that ‘sex offenders’ by their very nature are in the grips of “repetition and compulsion”. This is repugnant and noxious as law, as psychology, and as a principle of American jurisprudence specifically. It is, however, great politics and gripping political theatre.

I will not here repeat the numbers that the Court parrots as Facts and Findings of the Legislature. Suffice it to say that they paint a lurid worst-case and stunning scenario. Although, in the light of 15 years, they now appear as something far less valid. Yet, I point out again, this has not only failed to result in State and national pols reconsidering and retracting this scheme, but has rather perversely incited them to ever more intensive efforts to expand it. If I recall correctly, one national pol in 2008 introduced a Bill to refuse federal mortgage assistance to ‘sex offenders’.

But the Court will slyly reference the other side’s point: “As Doe acknowledges, successful treatment of sex offenders appears to be rare”. But the Court does not mention that in 1995, and in the statistics compiled between 1980 and 1994, there was almost by definition no ‘sex offender’ treatment because there was no ‘sex offender’ diagnosis (and still isn’t) in the professional psychiatric and psychological listing of mental illnesses. Persons undergoing treatment in that era would have been carrying a much graver diagnosis – schizophrenia, very likely – for which at that time (and even now) there is only a modest prognosis of complete recovery. The Court is not simply uninformed or a little weak in the reasoning department; it is – I would say – engaging in some sly and sleazy manipulation of its own.

And it goes on to introduce some of the now-classical supporting gambits.

“Sexual crimes are notoriously underreported”. It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative. How can you prove something that is by definition not-there? Statistical practice permits you to do so by extrapolation: you take a small sample, by selective questioning and study find out how many times your study-element occurs within that group, and then simply extend the math to the entire population. So, for example, if you take 1000 persons and ask about ‘sexual trauma’, and find out that in their case histories 80 percent of them have actually experienced an average of 3 legally-definable ‘sexual assaults’ in their lifetime though they never thought to report such to the police, then you take the entire population of the United States, take 80% of that number, multiply it by 3, and you get an ‘extrapolated’ number of ‘unreported’ sexual assaults that are ‘probable’ or ‘potential’. You wind up with a number of about 900 million, or almost a billion. And with a number like that, then as they used to say at Santa Anita, you’re off and running.

And if you want to ‘assume’ that a large fraction of the remaining 20% are “in denial” and probably experienced such assaults, or worse … well, you can see how helpful that would be to your purposes.

Now figure in a few little refinements. You define ‘sexual assault’ to include people brushing into you in the subway, a 2nd-grade classmate kissing you at your class birthday party, somebody staring at you for an uncomfortable period, somebody making an unwanted verbal advance … the list goes on. You could wind up with a number of astronomical proportions.

And suppose you select a study-group that is particularly primed to ‘feel’ sexually assaulted, especially if it’s in non-physical ways, and thus a study-group prone to place its own interpretations on what are on their face non-sexual and certainly legal acts. You can see where this could go.

“Sexual assault takes a heavy toll on its victims, particularly children.” A genuine sexual assault is a terrifying thing, no doubt about it. So is being held up at gunpoint or knifepoint and put in fear of your life. So, for that matter, is being sent as a soldier into what you discover is a hopeless and perhaps even unjust war where there is every indication that your commanders’ strategy is hugely flawed and that you stand a strong chance of getting permanently wounded or psychologically and emotionally unbalanced.

I do not take lightly any genuine sexual assault, as the words are commonly understood.

But in the coded parlance of sex-offense law, ‘sexual’ and ‘assault’ have been broadly expanded to cover all sorts of actions, or words, or even a person’s interpretations of actions or words. Whether this has been done to ‘keep up the numbers’ or so that pols can keep as broad a coalition of persons satisfied … or for other reasons, is a most interesting question.

And it has to be noted here that you have to exercise the same caution with these ‘numbers’ and ‘studies’ that you would have to do if you were being approached by Big Pharma or defense industry lobbyists who wanted to sell you a pill or a program. Even more than those types of folks, persons dedicated to ‘advocacy’ are morally content with the idea that the goodness of their cause permits them a certain – ummmm – looseness with facts and figures. Perhaps it’s in the air there in the Beltway. I recall quite some years ago an informal study by university libraries that discovered that the students most likely to purloin books were … nuns. Operating under numerous time constrictions, the good sisters apparently felt that since they were on a mission from God it would be OK to ‘borrow’ the book to take back for deeper and undisturbed study.

This idea – translated to American legislative, judicial, police, and government activity – has proven lethal. The Iraq war, the fundamentalisms of Left and Right in politics … the list goeth on.

It is also sketchy to claim – as the Legislature and the Court do here – that “chronic depression and anxiety, isolation and poor social adjustment, substance abuse, suicidal behavior, and involvement in physically or sexually abusive relationship as either aggressor or victim – are more common among adults molested as children than among those with no such childhood experiences”.

While it is certainly possible, from a logical point of view, yet such symptoms are – especially in children – rather widespread and could be the result of any number of factors. It would be a most careful and painstaking and brilliantly conceived and executed study indeed that could clearly isolate cause and effect in these matters.

And in this regard, I can’t help but recall the late-80s and early-90s welter of self-help-for-the-abused books (Lenore Walker comes to mind, among others) that drew numerous facile connections between ‘everyday’ experience and the presence of dark, early abusive experiences that were ‘repressed’. Walker refused to share her research ‘findings’ with ‘unfriendly professionals’ (those who were actually going to do the math and test her hypotheses) and ultimately withdrew her claims. Although, if memory serves, that did not stop Bill Clinton from bringing her to the White House and touting her as a major figure in sexual-abuse-and-trauma research. I bring this up just to remind you of what was in the air in this country in the mid-1990s.

It is these huge figures, the Court goes on, “that comport with other data on sex offender recidivism”.

We have dealt with the statistical ins-and-outs above. But the Court then moves on to assure that “the recidivism rates do not appreciably decline over time … the tendency to reoffend does not appear to decline with an offender’s increasing age”. That last statement is contradicted now by such government guidelines as have been developed, wherein the increasing age of a sex offender is officially considered to mitigate the probability for reoffense.

Slyly, the Court continues: “It has been estimated that extrafamilial child molesters have an average of as many as 19.6 victims (for those molesting a girl) and 150 victims (for those molesting a boy)”.

First, we note the “estimated”, which is a coy code for “extrapolated”. Especially as ‘extrapolation’ is put in the service of an advocacy’s ‘good’ cause.

Second, the “extrafamilial” gives away a certain political consideration, and one I think where the pols were not willing to follow radical feminist ‘abuse’ dogma to its bitter end. As we know now, the vast majority of child sexual abuse takes place within the home or among acquaintances and relatives. But to open this dark door would be politically unwise: it would target just about the entire population of families, and (as the radical feminists wanted to do) family-life in general. As even the Nazis knew, and Cass Sunstein recently wrote, the key to creating a mania is to isolate a specific and particularly vulnerable group for demonization; if you demonize the entire population you are going to mobilize mass resistance to whatever strictures you are trying to oppose. And, logically, you can’t try to turn an entire population against themselves. You have to mobilize the majority of them against some relatively small group of ‘others’. And dangerous others – that would be even better.

So the ‘dangerous stranger’ is the target of choice.

And then, helpfully, throw in your stats.

Which in this case are also stunning. The distinction between the number of girls allegedly molested (or abused, or assaulted – the terms are conceptually mushy and interchangeable) is much much smaller than the number for boys. Which lets you bring ‘homosexuals’ into your brew, which is always a surefire crowd-pleaser.

So you wind up leaving the crowd with a ‘dangerous stranger homosexual’. It is not quite – with all respect to that beleaguered folk – the Nazi “eternal Jew”, but very much closer to the radical feminist ‘eternal Male’, and certainly generates the public emotional negativity that would help lubricate acceptance of the whole sex-offender scheme.

Then the Court moves us quickly to the desired conclusion: “Clearly, both the Legislature’s and the public’s increasing awareness of the dangers posed by sex-offenders triggered laws here and elsewhere, as the understanding of the problem was accelerated by the occurrence of highly publicized and horrific offenses.”

Surely, a public emotionalism is a warning of the presence of a mania. And the “increasing awareness” was carefully and luridly ‘spun’ by advocates, and while the individual occurrences were indeed horrific, they were actually quite rare. And in the case of Megan’s Law itself, it was reported at the time by the local reporters that the parents of the deceased child knew, as did everybody on the street, that the killer was a strange and somewhat dangerous fellow. So the ‘spin’ was not altogether truthful, and certainly not accurate. But the Court is joining the Legislature in playing the old Nazi game here: once you’ve whipped up a frenzy through careful manipulation of public opinion (with the help of the press and media), then you can point to that ‘concern’ as the reason for government police action. So it happened against all the targets of Nazi social purification.

And ditto, pointing to cases “elsewhere” and “a national trend”. This thing started with the Beltway and the national Legislature. Which signaled an opening of the floodgates of mania on the State level.

Indeed, the fact that so many Megan’s Laws were passed in the country so quickly in such a short span of time (a year or two at most) is another ominous warning-flag of public mania. But the Court hopes that it will be seen rather as proof that the whole thing is ‘a good idea’ and is certainly what everybody in the country wants. All the ‘decent’ folks anyway.

I would say that is it is rather an indicator of just how far the apparatus of propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion had advanced in this country by the early 1990s. You cannot be familiar with the history of domestic national life in Germany in the 1930s without a shudder of recognition.

The Court concludes this Section with an even more stunning homily.

“The concern for the potential unfairness of identification has some justification, but it is wrong to assume the people of this State and the media will not understand that potential.” The Court claims that there is no great reason to worry that this whole thing will cause the citizenry and the media to engage in “harassment and vigilantism”.

Indeed, the Court tries to take the high-ground (while also absolving itself): “This Court has no right to assume that the public will be punitive when the Legislature was not [!], that the public, instead of protecting itself as the laws intended, will attempt to destroy the lives of those subject to the laws, and this Court has no right to assume that community leaders, public officials, law enforcement authorities, will not seek to educate the public concerning the Legislature’s intent, including appropriate responses to notification information, responses that are not at all punitive, but seek merely to protect their children, their families, and others from reoffense. And this Court has no right to assume the media will not act responsibly.”

First, in light of the past 15 years, I challenge anybody to find evidence of substantive and widespread efforts by any officials or the media to “educate” the public into the limitations and benevolent intent and working of this sex-offense scheme and its laws.

Second, it is clear that the Court is slyly limiting “harassment and vigilantism” to the most narrowly-defined instances: pitchforks, torches, lynching and all that. Rather, it is brutally clear that the lives of sex-offenders – the ability to reside, work, and conduct a relational life undisturbed and in peace – have indeed been “destroyed”. And with media help. And with ongoing legislative intensification and goading that continues to this day.

In a pre-emptive strike, the Court references Justice Stein’s Dissent in an attempt to defuse its acute insights: : “The dissent’s historical analysis, though relevant, is followed by, and ultimately amounts to, a prediction of a destructive and punitive community reaction that converts statutory protection into punishment.” The past 15 years in this country has demonstrated clearly that Justice Stein was accurate in his analysis and his predictions.

Worse, the Court then piously bleats that “we do not believe this Court should determine the constitutional question based on such a prediction”.

Goodness. The Court supports the sketchy predictions about inevitable sex-offender reoffenses and on that basis it will not interfere with the luridly Nazi-like and most ominously anti-Constitutional elements of this scheme, but it will not stoop to “prediction” in order to prevent the gross furtherance of this public mania, so similar to what was introduced – fatally – into German civic life in the 1930s.

It even asserts that “Obviously, future community reactions are impossible to discern”. Only if you don’t know any recent history (and many of the Concurring Justices were alive in the 1930s, and certainly aware of the uncovering of Nazi methods of instigating public mania as historical study revealed throughout the postwar period). But the Court chooses to ignore all that. Perhaps it genuinely believed in American Exceptionalism, that Americans are not like other peoples and don’t do ‘that sort of thing’.

Certainly, by 2003 American Exceptionalism absolved itself of any potential wrong-doing and launched an invasion of Iraq; America would not be like other peoples, making their same mistakes, even as it undertook actions that on their very face had constituted crimes when done by previous governments in recent history.

And American Exceptionalism passed the Patriot Act in 2001, an Act even more profoundly and broadly ominous than the Megan’s Law scheme, even more profoundly and broadly threatening to classic American liberty and the practice of public democracy, even more profoundly repugnant to everything that this nation has stood for and hoped for in its Founding vision.

I can’t help but believe that the Patriot Act Congress and all the courts of the land were fortified in their confidence by the example of the Megan’s Law legislation so piously and brazenly approved by the New Jersey Supreme Court half a decade before.

ADDENDUM

Just today in the morning paper there are several news bits that are relevant. In one, letters respond to an article in which a single-mother who locked her child away in an attic is defended by her father: the kid had ADHD and she couldn’t control him, said the father. The mother is the ‘victim’ in this script.

I note the entire phenomenon of a general public tendency to take their brief moments of media celebrity to style themselves as ‘victims’, especially when to do otherwise would expose them to opprobrium or criminal charges.

And this is a matter of rather poor mothering. Of course, the entire ‘single mother’ phenomenon is a spin-off of the 1990s radical feminist effort to ‘liberate women’ (as it was styled) by getting them free of patriarchy (institutionalized in ‘marriage’) and ‘men’ who by definition were held to be irretrievably violent as well as sex-sodden.

No opportunity for State intervention was followed-up. Doubtless, no government social worker wanted to risk career and job by suggesting that ‘a woman’ could harm ‘children’, especially her own.

And yet just a week or so ago, one woman murdered another precisely to remove the almost-to-term child out of her womb and present it to her own boyfriend as ‘theirs’.

And on the Taconic Parkway in New York a mother carrying a minivan-full of children drove the wrong way on the highway, killing herself and wreaking havoc among the children. The autopsy revealed a fresh load of alcohol in her stomach, and evidence of marijuana as well.

And in an opinion piece, a female columnist decries the fact that STDs among local teens have “skyrocketed 70 percent” between 1999 and 2007. Now this is a generation born into a world of empowerment, sex-offense awareness, and general sexual ‘liberation’.

The columnist shrewdly bemoans the fact that “the ballooning infection figures say something utterly demoralizing about the status of young women [a high school student is a “young woman”?] … it’s still girls [an interchangeable term for “young women”?] who are stuck pressing their partners to use condoms”. In other words, it’s a guy problem that females are stuck with trying to solve.

The idea that it takes two human beings to have – ummm – sex, or to ‘hook up’ (oy) seems irrelevant to her.

But as was the case in the recent Harvard Professor Gates brouhaha, a decades-old script is unrolled to spin the problem: “How did we get here … after 50 years of women’s equal rights … we’ve regressed to the point where girls – and especially African-American and Hispanic girls – are so powerless and so passive and so lacking in self-regard that they’ll go along with a deal [no accusation of rape or sexual assault or dangerous strangers here] that involves risking pregnancy, chronic infection, and worse”.

Well, I would suggest that decades of a denigrating and demonizing assault on ‘men’ – another prong of the same ‘war’ on ‘men’ that spurred the sex-offense mania, and of ‘valorizing’ enterprising ‘single mothers’ – yet another prong of the same ‘war’ on ‘men’ that spurred the sex-offense mania … the combined effect of all this has been to create societally catastrophic unintended (but hardly unforeseeable) consequences.

And do we think that the same type of dynamic has not played out in the ‘sex offense’ prong of the ‘war’ as well?

I go into all this to demonstrate the now-complex interactions, the synergy, of all of the above-mentioned social agendas that have been playing out for the past decades among us.
In that way, the sex-offense mania – noxious and toxic as it is on its own – can be seen in – to borrow Jesse Jackson’s recent phrase – the larger picture.

And a frightening picture it is indeed.

ADDENDUM 2

I can't help noticing: As I am writing this Post, I am listening to a cd of old Hollywood film songs in their orginal cuts. One is Maurice Chevalier with his thick French accent doing "Thonk Hayven, for leetle gairls, of five or seex or even sayven ..." One wonders when some enterprising pol or advocate is going to propose retroactively classifying him as a child-sex-offender, since he seems to imply a sexual interest in prepubescent children, and broadcast same on national and international media. (Although at least he is 'eenterested' in 'leetle gairls' and not ze leetle boys.)

Perhaps in best Medieval style his long-dead corpse can be exhumed, put on trial, found guilty ... it would be usefully 'symbolic' and would 'send a great message'.

Such is our modern American reality. And God save us all.

ADDENDUM 3

A last point I’ll bring up is mentioned in a by-the-by opinion column today about “Crime and Punishment” in America today: “Since the mid-1990s, the plunge in violent crime has been especially steep: from more than 51 crimes of violence per 1,000 of US residents in 1994 to 21 in 2005 – a 59 percent drop”.

You might be moved to suggest that the precipitous drop is directly the result of the laws under discussion here.

But I don’t think that could be right. If sex-offenders, under the grip of a “repetitive and compulsive” recidivism were indeed deterred by the presence of these laws, then they were in pretty good control of themselves, since slavering monsters are not known for their attention to published laws.

If on another hand, they have all been locked away or such, then the ‘emergency’ is passed.

But if that’s true, then sex-offending was specific to a particular era, and not to ‘males’ or ‘men’ in general, or to hordes of incurably ‘mentally ill’ strangers loose in the streets.

But on a third hand, perhaps there is some connection between the mid-1990s explosion of these laws onto the national scene and the decline in violent crime: perhaps it was precisely because of the decline, that advocates looking to spackle up their programmes began to deploy all the techniques of the mass manipulation of public opinion in a young and electronically-saturated society … because they saw that they could do it and they needed to 'keep the ball rolling'.

And that they had to do it before folks became aware of the decreasing violence of American society.

Certainly, there would have been a number of ‘interests’ that could be woven together into such an alliance of interest: law enforcement looking to keep up funding and public status; assorted less-than-A-list ‘therapist’ types who would like to get the funding and public creds associated with being ‘experts’ in a matter of great public interest; media who were looking for vivid, lurid, good-vs-evil, perp-vs-victim scenarios; and pols looking to appear as if they were ‘doing something’ by giving in to whatever demands their most organized voting blocs demanded.

Perhaps like the military-industrial interests, advocacies too need to keep ‘war’ going, or wind up losing funding and status. It seems a particularly lethal virus loose in the Beltway.

So it's concievable that what we are now facing is a monster unleashed by that awful synergy of interests that nobody now has the courage to stop. Like hapless Soviet-era delegates applauding one of Stalin's speeches, nobody wants to be seen as the first one to stop clapping.

That's the type of legislative problem to which our truly precious American political gifts have been reduced.

Oy.