The Registry: It starts with suicide

This piece has hit the national news due to the tragedy of the suicide, but looking a little deeper reveals some harder issues.

First, let's look at what our system of education has done to the girl. The girl (who is unnamed due to the fact that she was 14 at the time) was found to have a 'sex diary', describing her various conquests. In a later interview, she declared:

Yes, I'm a victim. I was a victim who was deceived by my own emotions and ignorance, of misplaced confidence, a victim of my own fantasies . . . Yes, predator for I chase people who themselves were victims of misplaced confidence."

So, she's a victim because she consented to sex... but she's also a predator because she consented to sex? Typical of our our American legal system treats sex... consent is not defined by someone's wishes, but by what the legal system declares. Not to mention what having our system declare her both predator and victom must have done to her.

The boy, who was eighteen, pled guilty to 'seduction,' a very old charge; this was an admission of guilt that did not require jail time or registration (likely due to a Romeo-and-Juliet law). Now, let's go forwards five years in time to 2007:

But changes last year require those who pleaded guilty to seduction to appear on the list, said the county's Chief Deputy Prosecutor Deborah Carley.

Under most civilized jurisdictions, that's double jeopardy. He's already paid for his crime (a very public outing and a long probation), but now the system was going back to give him a permanant black mark that would ruin his life.

The tragedy is not that the boy committed suicide; the tragedy is that our system drove him to it.

And so ends my backlog of blog entries. I apologize for being slow with them, but I had the misfortune of being given Fallout 3 for Christmas, thus destroying my free time.