OK Will Force Women Who Get Abortions to Be On Internet Registry!

Too Much Information, Not Enough Common Sense

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A new Oklahoma law will require the details of every abortion to be posted on a public website.
Mothers -- or would-be mothers, rather -- will be prompted to answer 37 questions that range from her marital status and race to how many times she's ever been pregnant. One question asks for the woman's reason to abort, offering "relationship problems" as a possible check-off box, and it's difficult to ignore the judgmental and disapproving tone.

The website, which will cost $200,000 per year to implement, is intended to prevent or decrease the number of abortions in Oklahoma, but the bill has already raised considerable debate, attracting opposition from the Center For Reproductive Rights and former Oklahoma Representative Wanda Jo Stapleton, among others. This questionnaire not only forces doctors into an uncomfortable predicament -- failure to disclose this information would result in "criminal sanctions and loss of medical license," as Salon's Lynn Harris reports -- but, put simply, it shames women. "They're really just trying to frighten women out of having abortions," Kery Parks, director of external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma, told Harris. Indeed, in a small town, probing details would easily identify the woman with a proverbial scarlet A.

Sensitivity issues aside, this possible law poses a question about the extent to which transparency works in today's information-saturated society, where the line between reasonable alerts and public shaming has increasingly blurred. The latter is nothing new, with historical roots in the mark of Cain, Jesus's crucifixion, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the Nazis' yellow stars during the Holocaust -- quite the range right there.

More contemporary examples include a theft defendant in Michigan who was ordered by
a judge to bear the words "Daddy, don't steal" on his arm, and convicted shoplifters who were sentenced to wear neon green t-shirt with the phrase "I'm a thief" while performing community service in Ohio.

Sometimes, transparency makes complete sense, like when a medical professor promotes a specific drug and simultaneously sits on the board of its distributor. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig discusses transparency's merits in The New Republic:

In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works. And making government data available for others to build upon has historically produced enormous value -- from weather data, which produces more than $800 billion in economic value to the United States, to GPS data, liberated originally by Ronald Reagan, which now allows cell phones to instantly report (among other essential facts) whether Peets or Starbucks is closer.

But Lessig's piece focuses more on the questionable uses of transparency, arguing that the good intentions do not always yield good results. Consider an editorial recently published in the New York Times about sex offender registries:

Meanwhile, an attempt to create a national registry -- part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act passed in 2006 -- has faltered badly. States fretting about the costs and legal complications all missed the deadline to comply, which was then extended to July 2010. They worry that the registry would create an overwhelming monitoring burden and that it uses crude means of assessing the likelihood that offenders might repeat their crimes. The list of offenders is so large as to be almost useless. It is supposed to include not only rapists and kidnappers but also flashers and teenagers who had consensual sex.

The Offender Locator iPhone application is among Apple's top-selling features, but is it creating more harm than protection? In many ways, as these sorts of disclosures, literally available at our fingertips, spiral out of control, and everyone can find out everyone else's business in the virtual community created by the Internet, we seem to be returning to the dangerous age that Hawthrone described. Oklahoma legislators, take note: "Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant," Lessig says, "But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well."

When Adults Fail Children—For Life

Brody's Scribbles... A Guest Editorial from Dr. Marty Klein

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When Adults Fail Children—For Life

By Dr. Marty Klein

The Iowa Supreme Court has affirmed the conviction of 18-year-old Jorge Canal, who complied with a 14-year-old friend’s request for a photo of his penis. The young man is now forced to register as a sex offender, meaning his chances of getting a college degree, job, or livable apartment are pretty much ended.

According to the court, the girl “generally hung out with teenagers older than herself;” was “only friends” with Canal; thought the picture was sent “only as a joke;” and was not “a means to excite any feelings.” Nevertheless, Canal was convicted of “knowingly disseminating obscene material to a minor.”

Canal was a foolish kid. But there are many ugly, stupid, irresponsible adults in this story. The girl’s mother, who checked her daughter’s e-mail and internet use, found the photo and forwarded it to her husband. The father then showed the photo to his friend, a police officer. The cop arranged to have Canal arrested. A prosecutor pursued the case, a judge tried it, a jury convicted. These adults failed Canal and his friend miserably. His ruined life will be a testament to their fear, insecurity, and hatred.

All these adults were supposedly attempting to protect Iowa’s young people–by punishing this kid who was fooling around with a pal.

So let’s spend a moment in the real world (which none of these adults seem to inhabit). Which is likely to hurt this 14-year-old girl more—seeing a 2-square-inch photo of a friend’s erect penis, or being the reason that this friend will spend time in jail and decades as a registered sex offender? Her life is now ruined (in addition, of course, to his), because of her criminally negligent parents, criminally ambitious prosecutor, and 12 jury members who failed to protect people who needed justice but received only wrath.

Americans should understand the horrors of our obscenity laws: a picture or word or object is obscene only after a jury decides that it is. And a jury can decide that ANY picture, word, or object is obscene. So no one can know for sure what’s obscene until it’s too late. This is exactly like laws against “hooliganism” in places like Russia that we rightly deride.

The judge in Canal’s case had rightly told the jury that “a depiction of a person’s genitals was not in and of itself obscene. In order for the depiction of a person’s genitals to be obscene, an average person applying contemporary community standards with respect to what is suitable material for minors must find the material is patently offensive, appeals to the prurient interest, and lacks serious literary, scientific, political, or artistic value.” At that point, the picture becomes illegal, and sharing it with someone else becomes a crime.

A jury of twelve Americans destroyed Jorge Canal’s life because they believed that a picture of his erect penis is “patently offensive.” I hope each of them never gets a good night’s sleep for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 29 years. As a clinician, he works each week with couples and individuals who have a variety of sexual and non-sexual difficulties--over 30,000 sessions since 1980.

Dr. Klein fights for the sexual rights of all Americans through his legal and courtroom work. He has been an expert witness, consultant, or invited defendant in many state and federal censorship, internet, and obscenity cases.

He has authored over 100 articles in publications such as Parents, New Woman, and Playboy, as well as San Francisco Medicine, the California Therapist, and the Journal of Homosexuality. He is also a former contributing editor to The New Physician, American Baby, and Modern Bride.

How many victims?

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0909/18/lkl.01.html

The other day Larry King was interviewing Dr. Phil and several other people about the Garrido case. And Dr Phil Said "The question on everybody's mind is Philip Garrido involved in some of the other disappearances that we've been talking about tonight. Dan Simon, you've been in Antioch. You've been all over this. Experts that follow these things with pedophiles and sexual offenders tell us that the average sexual offender can have anywhere 100 to 400 victims throughout their lifetime. So the fact that Philip Garrido has been tied to one that we know of and a violent rape before leaves an awful lot of concern that there are other victims out there. What does law enforcement think about this?" Dan Simon was a guest from law enforcement also on the show. Now I have heard others makes similar claims. That one reason we have to be so tough on Sex Offenders is they have so many victims. I haven't come across any studies that have supported this claim. Does anyone reading this know of a study that does support this claim of a high number of victims?
Let's take a minute and look at the numbers. There are over 650,000 registered former offenders. I've heard numbers putting the registry numbers at over 700,000. But for now lets just use the 650,000, figure, if each person on the registry each had 100 victims that would mean there are 65,000,000 victims of sexual abuse. And at 400 each that numbers come out to 260,000,000. Say the words two hundred and sixty MILLION potentional victims of sexual abuse! As of July 2006 the population of the United States is 304,059,724. If the numbers being quoted by the media and politicians are true then almost every person in the United States has been molested by someone already on the registry. And what about the new cases being reported? Over 86% of cases reported are new offenders, people not already on the sex offender registry. Lets look at another fact that is often touted out when you hear these 'experts' talking. Sexual abuse is very under reported. If so how do the numbers add up? On the ARC radio show, with Ron Book as the guest, one caller countered those very myths by saying "If at the rate the media is claiming, children are being victimized. We would be knee high deep in this country, in the bodies of dead & abused children."

Article mentions Shirley Turner whose son was slain by a vigilante

The mother of one of the people killed in the vigilante murders here in Maine in 2006 is profiled here. It's a sad and horrible story. Shirley Turner is one woman I would love to meet someday. I hope she knows that there are people who do care about what happened to her son and we are fighting to help make sure it never happens again.


From The Times

September 3, 2009

A sad lesson in ‘know thy neighbor’

Megan’s Law did not protect Jaycee Dugard. It helped create ghettos of abuse – and would do

Link here

Catherine Philp

Shirley Turner’s son was not a child rapist. He was a teenage boy madly in love with his girlfriend and three weeks before her 16th birthday they could wait no longer and made love in her bedroom while her parents were out at the movies. When her father returned and discovered them, he reported William to the police. He was charged with statutory rape, convicted, sent to jail and on his release his name was added to the sex offenders register under the version of Megan’s Law applied in his home state of Maine.

Shirley Turner’s stepfather, Brian, was a child rapist. He raped her at the age of 5. As Shirley approached her teens, her mother grew jealous of her husband’s apparent “preference” for her daughter. When she was 15, Brian took off, dragging Shirley with him and forcing her into marriage. William was her only child, fathered by her rapist.

When Stephen Marshall, a vigilante, started surfing Maine’s sex offenders register for child molesters to kill, it was William’s name he found, not Brian’s. Brian was never registered because Shirley never reported the crimes of the stepfather who became her husband. William is now dead, along with a more conventionally guilty paedophile in his town, both shot by Marshall. Brian is in jail, to Shirley’s relief, not for sex offences, but for attempting to murder her when she finally fled.

This was the tortured narrative I came across in Milo, northern Maine, in 2006, while looking for evidence of whether or not Megan’s Law worked. Shirley, a haunted shadow of a woman, wept warm tears on me as she told of the loss of her beloved son. She was one of the few people I connected with in this unsettling backwater where jaunty Stars and Stripes flying from clapboard houses disguised an underside of pure American Gothic.

BACKGROUND

I thought of Milo this week reading the latest soul-polluting details of the Jaycee Dugard case in Antioch, California, a place where the local Megan’s Law register recorded more than 100 registered sex offenders living in Phillip Garrido’s Zip code. In the small town of Milo, there were 42.

Jennifer Kale, the young mother who lived next door to Marshall’s second victim, had no idea she had a sex offender for a neighbour, despite having checked the register. She didn’t recognise the mug shot because she had never met him. “When I was little there was always some weird guy that your parents said to stay away from,” she said.

“You sort of knew. But it’s different now. Then you knew everyone but that’s all changed. You don’t know anyone anymore.”

Milo owes a number of its sex offenders to the introduction of Megan’s Law in neighbouring Massachusetts in 1999, three years before it was adopted in Maine. To escape registration there, many decamped north to Maine. Now Megan’s Law has been enacted across the United States, the migration has not stopped. Campaigners against the law argue it has driven many offenders underground or into hiding in plain sight; permanently transient to avoid registration or transplanting to neighbourhoods of the criminal underclasses where everyone minds their own business.

Garrido’s is such a neighbourhood, it is now emerging, where his neighbours built crack dens in their backyards and ignored the voices of children from the home of a man registered as a sex offender. Even there he was known as “Creepy Phil”. Megan’s Law did not exist when Jaycee was snatched but it would not have saved her. The Garridos travelled 150 miles to snatch her from her local bus stop. No internet search could have predicted that. Only one person ever reported the presence of children to the police, despite most neighbours admitting they knew that children lived there and that Garrido was on the register.

Every time a horrific child sex crime takes place in Britain, voices are raised in support of our own Megan’s Law. And yet there is no evidence that such a law has done anything to lower the level of child abuse. A 2008 federal-funded survey conducted in New Jersey, where Megan’s Law originated, concluded it had done nothing to deter the repeat offenders it is designed to target. It only made them easier to track down when they had reoffended.

Megan’s mother still defends the law named for her murdered daughter, saying she never intended it to deter offenders, only to “raise awareness”. But a register is a knee- jerk response to the cry of “something must be done,” and that done, we are all too happy to do nothing more. If a sex offender lives on our street, Megan’s Law gives us the means to hound them out to somewhere else — where they can prey on someone else’s kids.

If it corrals them into ghettos to escape us, so much the better. At least it keeps them off our street. Job done, there is no need for us to look out for the other children in our “community” or bother to check why someone else’s young girls are playing in the creepy man’s yard.

Meanwhile, most of the abuse goes on where it always has: in homes like Shirley Turner’s, where neighbours fear to tread. Megan’s Law satisfies our desire to do something, and fast. And it saves us from facing the awful truth that we don’t know who our neighbours are, and as long as they don’t bother us, most of us don’t care.

Catherine Philp is diplomatic correspondent of The Times

We have a mailing address now!

Today I set up CFC Maine's very own post office box. I can be reached by writing me at Citizen's For Change Maine or CFC ME, PO Box 611, Bridgton, Maine 04009. This means we can start our letter writing campaign and have a valid address to be reached at for those that do not have access to the internet. Thanks to those who gave so generously at our first meeting. Their donations allowed us to pay for the mailbox and we have purchased some stamps to get started. To anyone else who would like to assist us with the letter campaign donations of stamps would be greatly appreciated. Also I am looking for suggestions on how to write a letter, to be sent out to those on the registry and their families, that would gain their trust and that would motivate them to get involved. Has anyone else sent out letters in the past? What worked and what didn't? Looking forward to hearing from you all.