I’ve seen this story making the rounds on the internet, and I figured I’d weigh in too.
Basically, a 72-yr old man in Kansas was convicted of ‘aggravated indecent solicitation of a child’. Part of his sentence was that he needed to post signs on his house and car identifying himself as a sex offender. Now a few years ago, I would have been like ‘you’re goddamn right, but this isn’t nearly harsh enough’, but I seemed to have shaken my vigilante-esque attitude of late that encompassed the belief of removing body parts off of offenders. I guess I began to understand that such an action, aside from being completely insane and barbaric, would not really accomplish much especially since the core of the problem does not stem from a couple of nads, but from the mental aspects. This punishment just seems..off. As I’ve seen other people mention, if the man is truly a danger and the judge feels people need to be warned, then lock the dude up. If not, there is no point in doing this unless the intended result was to stir up some true vigilante nuts and have them harass the guy. It’s a difficult issue to be looking at, especially as a parent. I cannot honestly say that if someone harmed so much a hair on my kids’ head that I wouldn’t go utterly ballistic and unleash some raw animalistic maternal ass-kicking to reciprocate, because I know I would lose it completely. (I am the person that called my son’s first soccer coach’s wife a rather unpleasant name because she was getting a little too close to my son with her car, but in my defense I did not realize it was the coach’s wife. Had I known, I would have chosen a much less controversial insult to toss her way completely behaved myself. Yeah. He didn’t rejoin that team the next season. Too awkward.) I suppose it’s quite easy to allow ourselves to dismiss those deemed unfit for society , dehumanize them and condemn them to a sub-standard lifestyle, but there is just something in my gut that tells me this accomplishes nothing in the long run for our society. I certainly don’t want to seem like I’m sympathizing here with the ‘bad guys’, as I cannot possibly understand what would make a person think it was okay to do something of a sexual nature to someone who’s not anywhere near sexual maturity in the physical sense. I just don’t feel like this was the most effective sentence the judge could have come up with. It’ll be interesting to see if it holds up.