Prejudice and Punishment in a “Christian” Nation

December 3, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Have you been following the headlines that the much-touted California sex offender law passed last year may never be (fully) implemented?  Apparently the will of the people can be flouted simply by the expense of it all.

“Jessica’s Law” (after a 2005 Florida law) requires convicted sex offenders to wear a device for the rest of their lives so that a Global Positioning System (GPS) would monitor their whereabouts 24 hours a day.

I did not vote for this law, so this may seem like a cheap “I told you so.” But the law is completely flawed, and even more, the angry public mind-set behind it is also flawed.  (You can still read the impartial analysis from the 2006 Voter Guide here.)

To start with, if the law is implemented I can’t think of a better example of the “cruel and unusual punishment” forbidden by the constitution other than of course torture, which is apparently OK with the White House.

No other citizen in any country, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has even tried to track the exact whereabouts of its citizenry, even a tiny percentage of them who have been convicted. The law should be challenged in court and struck down. Alas, if it isn’t implemented, it won’t be challenged, so the thing sits there on the law books, when it should be removed promptly.

At present the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation already uses GPS for a small class of convicted sex offenders who are considered at “high risk for reoffense”–they will likely do it again. But that number is about 1,000 individuals. Proposition 83 extends that to some 90,000 registered sex offenders, a number which grows at about 8,000 per year. While you’re at it, you might want to read the state’s helpful pamphlet, There’s No Such Thing as a “Typical” Sex Offender.

The “cruel and unusual” part is important as a very basic civil right of every human being in the United States. While sexual crimes may be disgusting, so is murder. Jessica Lunsford was raped and murdered in Florida. Why not require all convicted murderers to be tracked forever? Stealing the life savings of an elderly couple is also disgusting. Who then should be required to wear a tracking device? Bankers? Option-ARM loan brokers? Enron executives? Republicans? Why just sex offenders?

In the 1990s we were in Italy, and spent a couple of days in Venice. This grand queen on the Adriatic is distinguished for, among many other things, inventing the word “ghetto” and it was used for the Jews. Venice had the original Jewish ghetto, where a huge gate was rolled shut and locked every night to keep the Jews confined to their own little island, separated from the Christians by those canals. I thought it was hilarious, at the time, because if 14^th Century Christians thought that Jews were devious and crooked, why didn’t they lock them in during the day when they were about their business of writing loans, doing banking, running businesses and making profits, instead of at night?

Proposition 83 is a cynical attempt to create a “virtual ghetto” by means of technology. Another of its provisions is that a convicted sex offender cannot live near a school or park. What difference does it make where any criminal lives (sleeps at night)? What matters is where the criminal commits his crimes, and so while the GPS provision was supposed to cover that, the harassment over where one can live is unnecessary and cruelly punitive. Yet the CDCR mailed notices 90 days ago to 2,741 whom they say live too close to schools or parks and must move. These individuals had 45 days to comply. Have you ever tried to find a new place to live, and complete your move, in 45 days? That alone is reason to challenge this law in court!

But more basic is the provision–-and this is the “angry public mind-set” part— of a life-time sentence to wearing a tracking device even after the time has been served and the parole has ended and there is no further relationship with the criminal justice system. If a convicted person has served his time, paid his so-called debt to society, how can a just society tolerate a law that essentially says, “screw you; Big Brother will never forget your crime even if Blind Justice does.” In other words, there is no forgiveness, not even after remorse and repentance, not even after making satisfaction for one’s sins.

This being a Christian nation (at least in the eyes of the conservative Christians), apparently the Christians who passed this law do not believe in forgiveness and so have essentially flunked the test of Christian doctrine. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  “Forgive your brother seventy times seven.” “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Okay, this is not a Christian nation, at least on selected issues—issues where public prejudice easily trumps core Christian beliefs. But don’t get me started on hypocrisy!

But why is this important to a blogger who is writing from am LGBT/Christian perspective?

It has only been four years since the Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized consensual sex between two members of the same gender. I am still not over the high court’s earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) in the gathering hysteria of the AIDS epidemic, that sent Michael Hardwick to prison.  (You’re too young to remember? View the pre-Lawrence “Sodomy Map” to see what you would have faced five years ago.)

Sodomy laws have been used for at least eight centuries to criminalize, torture and put to death two people who loved each other – all done of course under the big tent of the Christian faith. One of the clear conclusions of the late John Boswell’s research in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality was that within the course of less than 100 years in the middle of the Dark Ages, homosexual expression went from being legal to becoming a capital offense all over Europe. Unchecked fear, social prejudice and hatred whipped up a fever that has lasted from the 12^th century down to our own times.

When I first came out as a gay man—scarcely six months after the Stonewall Riots in New York City—I could have been arrested and sent to prison for expressing physical passion even with someone who was agreeable. More likely, I could have been blackmailed, shamed, and my career destroyed with just an arrest record (not even a conviction).

Okay, I didn’t have a career yet in 1970, but within a few years I did, and when my partner and I met, in Tempe, Arizona, our relationship was still criminal under the laws of Arizona.

We’ve come a long way in terms of civil rights as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, and Lawrence v. Texas was a huge step forward for us. (You should thank the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force that you are not in prison today!) But Proposition 83 was a huge step backward promoted by mean-spirited quasi-Christians who have attempted to inflict a punishment wholly out of proportion to the crime.

Perhaps the worst part of this law pushing the envelope on sex offenders is that it makes it more likely that convicted persons will drop out and disappear, rather than register or keep the CDCR informed of their whereabouts. Would you feel safer knowing that the onerous nature of this law has actually made sex offenders go underground? From a practical point of view, Proposition 83 specified no penalty if a convicted sex offender refused to comply with wearing a monitoring device. And it did not name the agency or set aside the funds for an agency to actually administer this law. While the state government dutifully goes the steps of trying to implement it, wasting tax dollars in the process, the fact that the law was so poorly written and not funded simply reinforces my point that it was written to make a moral statement and help the angry general public feel smug and righteous, rather than actually protect children.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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