IN THE REALM of sex-offender laws, Georgia has in recent years seemed unable to get anything right.
First came a frenzy of tar-and-feathers political excess that created laws so bad even law enforcement didn’t want them. People were registered as sex offenders for life because as teenagers they’d been charged for having sex with an underage boyfriend or girlfriend. Laws prohibiting registered offenders from living near schools, day care centers or school bus stops made no common-sense exception for one of those things springing up in a neighborhood where the offender had been living for years. Homeless sex offenders who had served their sentences had to register an address or be sent back to prison … draconian and unenforceable nonsense like that.
“We have gone too far,” Senate Judiciary Chairman and Columbus attorney Seth Harp, R-Midland, told fellow committee members, noting that big chunks of Georgia sex offender law have been ruled unconstitutional.
He’s right. Meanwhile, other protections against sex offenses haven’t gone nearly far enough. Some real victims were left out of the mix, like children subjected to incest by a relative of the same sex — or, much closer to home, a student seduced by a teacher, coach or other authority figure who couldn’t be charged because the student had consented.
The latter loophole might well be the product of a bizarre Georgia Supreme Court interpretation of the law, rather than a problem with the law itself. But the legislature is taking no chances: A Senate amendment to House Bill 571 would make all sex between a teacher and a student illegal, except at the college level and beyond. (Moral and ethical issues aside, any attempt to regulate the private sexual behavior of consenting adults would present its own constitutional problems.) A second amendment would expand and clarify the definition of incest.
The test of a sex offender law isn’t just how blindly harsh it is on the one hand or how finely parsed the legal language is on the other, but whether it’s effective in protecting victims and punishing real offenders. Harp and his colleagues are trying to take a big step in that direction.
From the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle
HAVE YOU READ the Constitution lately? Did you notice the oft-used “everyone should always get his way” clause? Neither did we.
Yet, Americans increasingly carry on as if, by some magic, everyone in the country can get his way. All the time.
Take the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
The anti-religion fringe group has read the Constitution to say they have a right to be free from religion. That means no mention of it by government and, they hope, in the public square.
They want to fundamentally transform American society, some 200 years in, to suit their own delicate tastes. They want their way. To heck with you and the rest of the country.
One of their attacks is on the National Day of Prayer. They decided to take it down — to deny Americans the day because they don’t like it and you shouldn’t have it. So they filed suit.
They did a great job of judge-shopping, too, getting a Jimmy Carter holdover, federal Judge Barbara Crabb of Wisconsin — who ruled last week that the day of prayer was unconstitutional.
That’s just ridiculous.
The people who formed this nation called for a national day of prayer back in 1775. Did they, too, act “unconstitutionally”?
Nor does the day demand anything from anyone — unlike, say, the recent health-care bill that requires you to purchase a product. It’s simply a decision by a free and religious nation to remind itself in a formal way of the need to seek God’s blessings.
At the same time, it should be a reminder to our elected leaders that their own power is far from supreme.
DO AS I SAY, not as I do — a statement many have heard from a parent or guardian in their childhood years. In most cases, it was an uncontested edict. They were mom and dad or respected guardian, after all. Their word was law.
But the Georgia General Assembly should take note: it is not our parents. And because it’s not, it is a farce to require local government to follow ethics laws that it would never approve for itself. Obviously, the majority of lawmakers in Atlanta feel differently. To them, there is nothing wrong with telling county and city boards of education in this state to “do as we say, not what we do.”
They’re doing that with the passage of a bill that requires boards of education to act a certain way. The measure even goes so far as to allow the governor to remove rogue members. In short, the law robs voters of their power to decide who can and can’t supervise their schools. Voters can easily understand the motivation behind the bill, even though it’s a kick in the gut of democracy. It derives from outrage felt by state officials during problems in public school systems like Clayton County, which lost its accreditation in 2008. Glynn County came close to doing the same because of an over-reactive and overzealous school board in the early years of this century.
In both cases, the people could have removed board of education members through the recall process. That they opted not to do that was their own choice, their own business, not the state’s. The new law passed by the legislature and which is likely to be signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue also requires school board members to submit to ethics training.
In light of all the controversy that rocked the Capitol in 2009 and early this year, controversy that ended in the resignation of the Speaker of the House, and in light of criticism by the public of the thousands of dollars in gifts legislators are accepting from lobbyists, the General Assembly should consider submitting itself to ethics training.
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