|
Companion piece to: “DEAD END: The International Megan's Law's Assault on Everyone's Freedom of Travel”
“HOMELAND SECURITY'S” ASSAULT ON TRAVEL:
How America's sex laws endanger your, your children's and everyone's freedom of movement as travelers are routinely detained, interrogated, searched and harassed by the Department of Homeland Security
by David Kennerly
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” —Justice William O. Douglas
The dramatic expansion of the many crimes now considered to be “sex offenses” and the encroachment of those laws into the lives of those ensnared in its web, should find us all disturbed by its potential to destroy livelihoods, relationships, families, freedom of movement and even lives, themselves.
America and the world must stir itself from the enthusiastic credulity with which it has greeted the steady drumbeat of laws which expand the definition of “sex offenses” and which impose ever more draconian punishments which suffocate the life out of the sex offender.
That children, themselves, are now routinely among those identified as “sex offenders”, and often for the experimentation and play which would have, in earlier times, escaped the perverse attentions of law enforcement (if not their parent's ire) should disabuse us of our comfortable assumptions about who is, today, a sex offender.
When we consider that such kids, or those whose “sexual offenses” were “committed” as kids, have rights which are vastly degraded beyond those of anyone else, and an endless stigma imposed upon them which no one else is forced to endure, then we should find our comfortable prejudices, born throughout these years of ever-expanding legislation, pointedly challenged. Our unassailable beliefs should, rightly, be assailed and we should lend far more consideration to those voices which arise, not just from good faith, but from reason and experience.
For far too long we have allowed those whose voices have overpowered all others to enjoy a monopoly on speech with results exacted in the destruction of lives and liberty; often of those of children, themselves.
We should begin to listen with greater respect to those with a high regard for justice and reason and who speak and act from rational insights gained through genuine experience and knowledge. We must no longer allow those who shout the loudest to drown-out our own sensibilities or commonsense.
Regardless of the outcome of the International Megan's Law bill now in the U.S. Senate, sex offenders will, undoubtedly, continue to be treated worse than virtually any other traveler (except for, possibly, journalists) as they have been for more than a dozen years. [See: DEAD END: The International Megan's Law's Assault on Everyone's Freedom of Travel]
U.S. citizenship offers no assurance to anyone that they will pass unmolested through this area which is the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) / Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pre-clearance hall (just after baggage-claim) found in every international airport in America but you can bet that, for the sex offender, their treatment is often very much worse.
An American sex offender traveling on business can return to the U.S. on a direct flight (at least half of whose occupants were nationals of that flight's country of origin) from a country whose inhabitants are overwhelmingly, if not almost exclusively, Muslim (as has happened) and with established networks of Islamic terrorists, either Al Qaeda or those closely allied with Al Qaeda, during a peak terror watch level (the color code having been declared “Red”), and be reasonably confident that he (and it's almost always a “he”) will be the last person to leave the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol secondary inspection area, out of all of the travelers from that flight.
One need not advocate the random harassment of Muslims or of non-white travelers, by any means, to be puzzled by this apparent incongruity, especially when one considers that the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA were created particularly to guard against terrorist threats and with an unapologetic policy to actively profile those thought to be Muslim.
|
