Wasting Away Again in Pedophiliaville
California gubernatorial candidate, Republican Douglas Hughes, has a solution to the problem of what to do with pedophiles. If he wins the election, he promises to give them 3 choices:
1. Leave our State of California permanently;
2. Live on Santa Rosa Island (a self supporting community for pedophiles and sexual offenders);
3. Remain in prison for life;
Seriously? A community on Santa Rosa Island?
Aside from the civil liberties issues this brings up, there’s a larger problem that must be dealt with first. Our child protection laws across the nation need to be overhauled so that they actually do what they are meant to do. In one case after another over the last few years, the very people who are supposed to be protected by these laws have been prosecuted under them. The result of these abuses of the law by overzealous prosecutors is that children have wound up being labeled as child molesters and suffering the same punishments. If you want some examples, search through the blogs of Dr. Marty Klein or Johnathan Turley. There are too many to count. Typically they come from cases of sexting by school kids, but sometimes involve consensual sex between minors. Take, for example, the case of Genarlow Wilson from Georgia a few years back.
At a New Year’s Eve party, when Wilson was 17, he had intercourse with one 17-year-old girl and received oral sex from another 15-year-old. Accused of raping the first girl, he went on trial and a jury found him innocent. However, because the age of consent in Georgia is 16, he was also charged with child molestation for the oral sex the younger girl performed.
But there was one other charge the jury had to decide on. The second girl in the videotape was 15, and the age of consent in Georgia is 16. And under state law, prosecutors charged Wilson with aggravated child molestation. To those close to the young man, it was an outrage.
“Nobody could believe that this is the law,” Mann said.
Even jurors frowned on the charge. “A bad law, absolutely,” Manigault said.
And in Georgia, that they’d had oral sex made matters worse. Until 1998, oral sex between husband and wife was illegal, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. In Wilson’s case, even though he is only two years older than the girl, she was 15 and — willing or not — could not consent legally that night.
Whatever their feelings about the law, jurors felt they had no choice but to find Wilson guilty of aggravated child molestation. Moments later, back in the jury room, jurors were told for the first time that the conviction came with a mandatory sentence of at least 10 years in prison. In addition, Wilson would be forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
This sort of ridiculousness has happened across the country, in red and blue states. The Georgia Legislature did finally revise the law and Wilson was eventually freed (now consensual sex between minors in Georgia is a misdemeanor — still ridiculous but better than before). If something similar were to happen in California under Douglas Hughes, people like Genarlow Wilson, being branded as sex offenders, would be shipped off to Pedophiliaville if they didn’t choose exile or life in prison.
As long as our child protection laws are too broad and our governing officials too conservative, this sort of injustice will continue. Yes, we need to punish people who actually rape children. But we damned well better be sure that it really is rape first. Arbitrarily declaring an age of consent and declaring all sexual intercourse with anyone below that age to be molestation is not the way to go about it. So until that issue gets sorted, dreaming up more severe punishments for pedophiles needs to wait. And loons like Douglas Hughes need to be kept far, far away from government.