Accusations Are As Good As Convictions, in Ohio

This is one of those stories that makes you glad you live in a Blue State.

An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime. Plan gains to publicly identify accused

You wouldn't have to be convicted, not even charged with anything, only accused, and your name goes on a list that everybody can see.

The rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio's so-called Megan's Law.

The person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live.

A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years if there have been no new problems and the judge believes the person is unlikely to abuse again.

I had a friend once who was a high-school coach. He was strict about attendance, and didn't give automatic A's just for showing up.

When the kids were playing football, he taught the quarterbacks to put their hands between the center's legs while waiting for the snap, and that's all it took. A couple of kids who were unhappy with him for his strict policies went and complained to the principal, saying that the guy was forcing them to touch each other inappropriately. Even though ... that's what you do in football.

It ruined his career. He was a smart enough guy, I figure, to find another job and another community where this reputation wouldn't dog him around. I won't say it ruined his life, but he had to pull up and start over.

In the Orwellian Ohio of the near future, my friend would've been on this list for at least six years, searchable on the Internet.

The attorney general's office said it continues to hold discussions with a group representing day care operators about one of the rules pertaining to what such facilities would do with information they might receive pertaining to someone on the registry if that person is living nearby.

... day care operators?

So a guy propositions a woman on the street, and the day care center needs to be notified?

There is a strange cognitive thing that people do: they attribute higher probability to things that are more vivid. If something is easier to imagine, we sense that it is more likely to happen. If we hear about something more, we think it is more probable. An obvious thing is terrorism, compared to, say, traffic accidents. Lots more people are killed in traffic accidents than terrorist attacks, but we spend a lot more energy (and money) preventing terrorist attacks.

When it comes to discussions of sexual behavior, this phenomenon is wildly explosive. Who knows why, but nearly everyone has sexual fantasies. I had a married friend once who could hardly talk to women at all, because as soon as he met one he started imagining the torrid affair that could ensue when the woman discovered she was irresistibly attracted to him, and then he started saying things to cool it down before it started. Or, worse, he would get incredibly nervous, imagining what was going to happen when his wife found out. Women saw him acting evasive, distant, rude -- little did they know what was going through his head.

In thinking about this accused-sex-offender list, it is easy to imagine bewhiskered, drooling child molestors hanging around schoolyards, it is easy to picture groping, grunting guys exposing themselves, dirty things. It is infinitely harder to imagine the more common thing, a guy who doesn't realize a girl is underage, and guy who doesn't know what to say and says the wrong thing, a guy who does nothing at all but gives somebody the uh-oh feeling. Lots of innocent people will be caught in this trap.

I was on a radio show the other day where a question was asked about the "sexualization" of everything in our society. I didn't get to respond (there were, like, five "experts" taking turns), but it made me think about what my answer would be.

Of course everything in our society is sex sex sex. And I think everybody realizes it's not healthy sex, it's not what you'd call "normal" sex, it's a kind of perverse sex, blown out of proportion. I think what happens is that there is, and always has been, an American desire to make sex disappear altogether. We could be so much more productive, so much more rational, so much less anxious, if these stupid feelings would just go away. There is a constant pressure -- in our country, not everywhere -- to suppress sex.

But the suppression of sex is a notoriously futile endeavor. We all know it won't actually go away, no matter how many Decency Leagues attack it, no matter how many Family Blah Blah organizations lobby against it. I'm afraid that what happens is that sex ceases to be a natural phenomenon and instead becomes an obsession. One of those things that, because you're trying not to think about it, you can't stop thinking about it. The phenomenon is well known in psychology under a number of names.

So then, instead of normal sex, where ordinary people find one another attractive, we have a culture of fetishistic cravings. And then ordinary people feel that, in order to be attractive to someone, they have to become a fetish object. Girls starve themselves. Guys buy absurd cars. Ordinary people, people with regular-colored hair and normal bodies, people whose conversation deviates from the patter of professional media fetish objects, are seen as un-sexy, unlovable, boring. Sexual attraction stops being something natural, and becomes something neurotic, uncontrollable, incomprehensible, exploitable.

If Ohio goes through with this, there will be a lot of people humiliated for nothing. A guy will say something wrong, or give somebody the creeps, a dad will see a neighbor watch his daughter walk down the street, and there they go, on the list. For six years. There's a lot of tension and a lot of insanity surrounding these kinds of things, they should at least have to convince a jury that the guy did something wrong.