What could possibly go wrong?

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and you couldn't make this up. If you thought false allegations were already a serious epidemic, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. To everyone living in Ohio: run, don't walk, run for the border...

"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."

"Rubber stamped" brings to mind bureaucrats doing things they're not really thinking about, just as long as the piece of paper went through the right process. They also missed out the word "alleged" in front of "sex offenders", but if a sex offender hasn't been charged with a crime, is she or he still a sex offender?

"A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit."

"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."

Note the deft insertion of a gender-specific pronoun.

"A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years"

I am reminded of the book Wild Swans describing what it was like to live through China's Cultural Revolution where denunciation was a national sport and lives destroyed at the word of a neighbor with an axe to grind.



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