Looking for Romance Online? Try the Sex Offender List.

Some of the most romantic and sporting people are to be found there... only because they were goofing around.

Peeing on a tree is s sexual offense?

(Noma Barr, The Economist)

"At least five states required men to register as sex offenders if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public. No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered streakers."

— The Economist

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Out of 17,000 registered sex offenders in Georgia, a very small number, just over 100, are classified as "predators", which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences.

Only five percent, 850, were clearly dangerous, while 35% were potentially threatening and 65% pose little threat at all.

"ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.

"Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal."

Thoughtful, serious people see the obvious problem. These lists are only useful to people who require even the least offensive people to be judged beneath them.

When making out at lovers lane with your high school sweetheart, peeing urgently in public, or skinny-dipping on a dare is a felonious crime, the list of offenders becomes a jumble of gross misinformation only the panicked and self-righteous abide.

Something from the commentariat:

"I have no sympathy for serious offenders, and support the harsh penalties meant to keep potential victims out of their immediate reach. However, the article is spot on with regards to minor infractions that result in the perpetrator being placed on a sex offender registry.

"Is some idiot drunk who gets caught taking a whizz in a street alley really on an equally low level with a child rapist? What's the point of this list when there is no way of telling if the guy living down the road is a child molester or some goof who streaked at a football game?"

— Dirk Diggler

Because "every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough," we're locking up and marking for life people who went streaking, those who couldn't wait to pee at home. Teenagers are criminally tainted for life... socially ostracized after having had sex with each other.

"Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married."

The Rapture-ready, sex-panic police are one thing, but it takes more than just them to incite the fear in our lawmakers, who resort to legislative over-kill that ruins the lives of someone as innocent as your childhood sweetheart or as harmless as a frat-house buddy peeing on the side of a tree.

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