Battleangel

No “war criminal lives here” signs mandatory outside of Crawford ranch as of yet. But I digress. Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun is there to document of course.

The homemade signs reading “A Sex Offender Lives Here” are posted on all four sides of Leroy Schad’s white house in his central Kansas town of about 150 people.

As part of the order, his car is now emblazoned with bold yellow lettering reading “Sex Offender In This Car.”

The 72-year-old, who has lived in the town since 1971, was originally charged with four counts of taking indecent liberties with a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy in 2005.

In March last year, he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child, and the original charges were dismissed.

District Judge Ron Svaty ordered him to position the signs as part of his punishment as well as house arrest and five years probation.

For the record, “indecent liberties” in this case means “inappropriate touching”. You gotta wonder who is really hurting these kids the most. I’d reckon it is a society that is so fixated on punishment it will destroy the victims, never letting them forget and move on. By stigmatizing the offender in this way, one also stigmatizes the victims. Then again, as I have shown time and again, America is a savage, vengeful, quasi-christian society. A culture of hate, salivating over its own bloodthirst, making them feel morally righteous so that they can distance themselves from these acts. The ones that applaud this the most are probably the most likely to be closeted sex offenders.

Basically, this is a backwards way to misuse authority. A sign is meant to warn people of a danger. If this man is so dangerous, why is he allowed to roam free? It is also a covert way to place Schad in mortal danger and indirectly exact a punishment that the law - or the investigation - did not allow for. And the public should not have access to confidential information that could harm individuals, disrupt the order or pose as a security risk. At least that is the argument when the government is asked to reveal any of its secrets. For the individual it seems like a reasonable part of the social contract that sensitive information collected by the state is kept safe and that it is the role of the state to keep the public safe from sex offenders. Not by posting signs and inciting lynch mobs for political brownie points, but rather by providing solutions on a scale from incarceration to therapy.

Plus, statistically, and in terms of harm, there are probably far worse offenders that you could be living next door to. But obviously, being shot dead is probably more acceptable than being touched in Jesus land. Of course, the way this is going I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone convicted of a crime in the U.S. would eventually be required to identify themselves. And as pointed out here, it must be a real financial disaster to live next door to a known sex offender with signs on the house. It wont exactly do wonders for property values.

All in all there is a lot of collateral damage, and no one is better off. Above all, no one is measurably safer. It’s kind of the same old tune from America.