It is a political issue that is peculiarly associated with a political movement. That movement was deeply organized, well funded, and was successful in large part. As a result, we now have the impression that it is some basic truth that transcends politics and has been with us "forever". But that is only if you have a very short memory (which politically, we seem to have).

The "sex pervert" madness is something that emerged with the most significant political movement in the late twentieth century, and it followed with most of the other issues and strategies used in that movement. It's overall design was to deflect critical thought and dissatisfaction among the public away from authorities (who at that time were the target of criticism), and to target that aggression back into the population. The overall point message was this: Your enemies are among your peers, not among the executive authorities who police you. The "sex pervert" simply was a convenient vehicle for emphasizing and promoting that point of view and making it more palatable.

At the time of that revolution, the baby boomers were mostly at the stage of life where they were parenting young children, and they naturally reacted to rhetoric which made them fear for their children. They were also still young enough to be overtly sexual, and thus it was easy to arouse their disgust with stories of perverted sexuality.

Nothing in our history matches the results. Sex offenders have become the model cause for a frightening departure from traditional American values about justice. The ideas that started with sex offenders have spread to other offenses, and are dangerously close to becoming universal. The registration laws (public branding), and the other things like holding people beyond their sentences (civil commitment), are not matched by anything in our history. These practices are diametrically opposed to our most fundamental ideas about justice, and we see in our legal heritage repeated rejection of these practices. It takes a very active imagination to rationalize that these things are constitutional. They are blatant rejections of all the ideas behind the Bill of Rights. It is a blatant anti-constitutional attitude, but the conservative movement somehow sold us on it. We are not going to recover until someone comes up with an explanation. Otherwise, our rights are meaningless.

Emotional froth that can be raised over sexuality provided a convenient vehicle for Americans to forget who we are. That is why it was chosen as a strategy for the conservative movement.

In another post, I noticed a comment that summarizes the whole idea for me. I remember when the conservative mantra was, "why isn't anyone worried about the victim's rights?" The comment noted that as humans we are capable of multitasking. We can be worried about more than one thing. The rhetoric of the conservative movement has given us this impression that there is only one side to every issue, and that we must choose.

Everyone is concerned about victims. But what good are we doing victims if we don't do real justice, and we just promote hasty conviction and punishment and vigilantism? For instance, the person who was convicted of killing the little girl in Plano named Ashley, and which led to a series of sex-offender laws in Texas called "Ashley's Laws" which made it easier to convict anyone of sexual offenses, turned out to be innocent. He was exonerated by DNA. Therein lies a very important message. The laws this man was convicted under were considered too weak, so we changed them to give a greater advantage to the prosecution. Then, it turns out the conviction obtained easily under those "insufficient and weak" laws was false! The guy didn't do it! Now, we have laws that make it even easier to convict, when the previous laws resulted in wrongful conviction to begin with. Where is the reason in this? I don't get it.