Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Virginia To Investigate Matriculators As Deviants
By Frederick Meekins (07/01/06)
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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