DANGEROUS DOTS

The Missouri State Senate has passed – with only one Nay – a State constitutional amendment to be presented to the voters in November.

The amendment wants to allow retroactive laws in the matter of sex offenders. Previously, retroactive laws for criminal offenses had been forbidden by the State (and the US) constitution.

The US Constitution still forbids retroactive laws; you cannot be punished for breaking a law that was passed after your crime, nor can you be additionally punished by such a law. Congress and the Supreme Court have gotten around that little hurdle. Congress piously intones that its intent is not ‘punitive’ but simply regulatory, like keeping a national database of drivers licenses or accredited doctors, and also – anyway – it’s an ‘emergency’. The Supreme Court has so far managed to agree (the link here is to the case of Smith v. Doe), a feat achieved by refusing to take note of the world outside the doors of their hallowed hall and with a sly mulishness refusing to take official ‘notice’ of reputable studies – including those done by the Department of Justice – that indicate the ‘sex offender’ class of offense has almost without exception a lower recidivism rate than any other crime category.

After all, if the Court ‘noticed’ that the aggregate sum of all pains attached to the ‘sex offender’ classification adds up to something rather close to wearing a colored star on one’s clothing, or if the Court ‘noticed’ that there is not at all as great a danger to ‘public safety’ as has been asserted by various ‘advocates’, then the whole upside-down pyramid would collapse like a Ponzi scheme.

The Missouri Senate, alas, had a problem similar to being the town nearest the first crack in a shoddy levee: the Missouri Supreme Court recently declared that the ‘sex offense’ schemes were indeed ‘punitive’, and therefore could not be applied retroactively (i.e., to persons whose convictions or pleas ante-dated the passage of the first Registration laws in the State). So there would be the devil to pay if a very large chunk of the entire sex-offense scheme was breaking loose; who knew if that might not start a flood of more careful looking at just how useful or just these laws were in the first place? Part of the sweeping and sudden popularity (not to say 'success') of these laws is that 'due to the emergency' nobody has really kicked the tires.

You would think that a body of legislators, faced with a Decision declaring one of their laws not only unconstitutional but in violation of one of the most important safeguards erected against tyranny (either by monarch or mob) … you'd think then that they’d retire for some sustained contemplation, perhaps with at least a shred of sackcloth and a pinch of ashes. But no.

Instead they whomped up the above-mentioned proposed amendment to the State’s constitution. Henceforth, the Constitutional protections carved into stone in court-houses all over the State and the entire nation would apply to all citizens – except sex-offenders. Although who can be sure that even that limitation might not be overridden at some point? History shows that once governments have gotten the taste of that sort of blood …

I think this is a remarkably revealing bit of behavior, and that its revelation extends beyond Missouri to all of Our assorted legislators and legislatures, State and Federal.

The bad news is that a body of legislators would pass a law that would be so profoundly liable to a finding of unconstitutionality to begin with. Do they even think about these laws before they pass them? Do they even care any longer?

The good news is that a State Supreme Court (and it’s not the first; Alaska’s Supreme Court was, although the US Supreme Court in Smith v. Doe slapped them down with a hash of the above-noted ‘reasoning’) decided that its responsibility to protect and preserve the State constitution overrode the mania to pretend to protect citizens (yes, even ‘the children’) by diluting the constitution. The Missouri Justices are to be commended.

The bad news is that a bunch of legislators at any level would allow themselves to get mired in such a lose-lose situation: nobody is really protected in the short-term, and through the dilution of constitutional integrity the entire common weal is endangered in the long run.

But this is a classic example of what has happened to American politics in the past forty years. Not even at the height of McCarthyism, when the Russkies had the Bomb and Mao had China and spies were thought to be everywhere – not even then was there a concerted push by legislators to officially and permanently dilute the Constitution. Hell, the whole idea was that the American way of politics and justice was so superior to Communism that the Americans didn’t need to resort to such rotten Red tactics. Of course, that was before Bush, Cheney and their posse of darkness insisted that chasing terrorists was “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” that required (the words spoken with a macho flourish) ‘getting our hands dirty’ and “walking on the dark side”.

But Bush, Cheney and the posse of darkness were preceded by several decades of ‘revolutionary emergency’, during which a Constitution put together by a posse of ‘dead white males’ was suddenly declared to be oppressing huge numbers of ‘victims’ and had to be ignored forthwith for the sake of ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ or whatever nice-sounding word this or that ‘advocacy’ cared to come up with.

And the Democrats were the ones who opened the door to such a vampiric assault, in their either witless or cynical desperation to win new ‘voting demographics’ to their side. It was Tip O’Neill who devised the strategy of abandoning the old New Deal ‘base’ of workers and families, then pandering to the demands of the new ‘demographics’ without asking any questions while quietly collecting cash from the corporations through O’Neill’s invented PACs.

Figuring that they could play the same game, the Republicans got aboard in Reagan’s first administration, pandering to their own ‘base demographics’ while collecting cash from corporations.

They figured, maybe, that they could go on like this forever: letting this or that Identity’s ‘advocates’ tear whatever chunks they wanted out of law and social policy and even the Constitution, while raking in the PAC dough in exchange for gutting regulatory laws and – essentially – the New Deal’s supervisory structure.

But History, like battle, is not a one-variable affair, let alone a static game. Pandering to demands but seeking ‘cover’ for what they were doing, pols at all levels welcomed ‘pain’ stories: for whatever ‘demand’ they were about to give in to, the pols could point to a passel of well-drilled persons-in-pain just outside the door; how could you expect an upright legislator to ignore that pain? How could you expect an upright legislator to allow something as ‘abstract’ as ‘law’ or ‘principle’ to slow down the pols’ dashing ride to the rescue?

But after a while the pols became trapped by their own game: once they had permitted ‘pain’ to trump any other consideration, then whoever claimed ‘pain’ had them all by – you should pardon the expression – the short hairs.

And if those ‘in pain’ demanded that constitutional protections be removed from those who were – or were at least perceived to be – causing the pain, then any pol who said Whoa was risking a gaggle of ‘pained’ demonstrators out in front of the office, with TV cameras and mikes.

And so ‘pain’ came to trump law and jurisprudence and even the Constitution. (And when 9-11 ‘happened’, Bush Cheney and the posse of darkness instantly declared themselves ready to deploy the military to alleviate the pain of loss and humiliation … and you know how the rest of it goes.) . So now the pols are caught in this trap of being unable to say No to a 'victim demand' or a 'public safety emergency'; like Soviet era-era 'delegates', none of whom wanted to be seen being the first one to stop applauding after a speech by Stalin (so the applause simply went on and on - Stalin is said to have enjoyed standing at the podium, letting the time roll on, watching the increasingly desperate 'law-makers' as their arms got tired and they kept looking around to see if somebody else had been the first one to stop clapping and let them all off the hook).

Nor were the media – once known as ‘the free press’ – any help. Inveigled into ‘advocacy journalism’ back forty years before, they had completely debased themselves through selective ‘noticing’ and ‘reporting’ (for what else is ‘advocacy’ except a highly focused selectivity?). And having done it for the Democrats, then as the Republicans began to generate their own dynamics in response to the ‘demands’ of the ‘pain’ that their own bases felt, there was nothing the press and media could do except hide behind ‘balance’: simply stenographize whatever one or the other side put out and let the citizens make of the mess what they could.

Nor, for that matter, are the lawyers completely innocent; for decades now many of them have been indoctrinated in law schools to the filthy concept that ‘law’ cannot be neutral, but must be an ‘advocate’ for this or that group, and ruthlessly so – allowing no ‘quaint’ Constitutional principles to stand in the way (and that, sportsfans, is where the total dimbulb Alberto Gonzalez got the idea). What else, I ask, was any Fascist or Communist judge but ‘not-neutral’, and an ‘advocate’ for whatever the government felt was ‘good’ for the people?

But fortunately, We haven’t yet reached that point.

So Missouri. Its Justices, its pols, its people.

The bad news might be that the state pols are so ‘committed’ to the ‘pain’ that they are going to actually start dismantling the most fundamental and historic constitutional principles and protections. I can’t say that it’s an impossible scenario – not anymore.

The good news, though, might be that they want ‘out’, but without having to be photographed or recorded saying No to ‘pain’. So they’re going to fob the problem off onto the People of the Great State of Missourah. If the voters approve the amendment, then it’s going to take a rip-snortin’ Supreme Court Justice to continue defending the ‘quaint’ Constitutional principles.

And if the voters turn it down, then the pols are off the hook and can piously bleat that they are simply following the popular will (so please go away from in front of the office and take the cameras and your posters with you).

I don’t know: is it better to have a bunch of pols who are willing to gut their constitution? Or a bunch of pandering, gutless sleaze-balls who are willing to shirk their duty (for which they are nicely paid) and let the voters do the heavy-lifting?

But the voters of that Great State need to understand: this is not about ‘sex offenders’. What they are facing in November is the first (as far as I know) instance of the most basic Constitutional principles being abridged in the service of that ‘pain’ which has been the cat’s-paw of decades of domestic assault on the entire American political vision, on the American Experiment itself.

After decades of domestic ‘war’ – on this, on that – We have become used to living in a ‘state of emergency’ where ‘pain’ must be addressed immediately, and no ‘law’ can stand in the way. That was precisely the justification given by Lenin and Hitler in their ‘revolutions’; although Hitler, more apposite in a way to Our present situation, saw that the best avenue of assault is to subvert democracy ‘legally’ and put your own people into the government and the courts – no decent German citizen could take heart from seeing uniformed Brownshirts ‘elected’ to the Reichstag, climbing those marble steps in a jackbooted gaggle to take up their seats and ‘vote’ the Republic away under the guise of ‘saving’ it from pain.

Clearly the Missouri pols don’t grasp the unique Gift to world history and to the world’s peoples that was the Founding Vision of the United States, duly erected into a plan of self-government in the Constitution. But then, not only do their ‘bases’ not have a grasp of that sterling illumination, but many of them – especially on the ideological feminist Left – are actually committed to denying that historical reality root and branch, and ‘reforming’ it; what ‘good’, after all, can come from patriarchy, males, and whiteness? Oy. Nobody – not ‘victims’, not ‘oppressors’, not men, not women, not children – will benefit from the loss of the Constitutional structure. We are headed down a fatal path.

A house that divided, as Lincoln and Scripture observed, cannot stand.

NOTE

The 'LA Times' reports today that a former federal prosecutor and now-Congressman from California is proposing a "national arsonist registry" because he claims that if there was such a Registry then some of the Southwest wildfires could be prevented or the arsonists who set some of them more easily tracked and caught. I am not at all making light of the genuine awfulness of wildfires (any more than I make light of the suffering of genuine victims of sexual assaults). But I point out how the 'registration' concept is starting, as so often in this sort of thing, to 'migrate', to 'creep', to 'bleed over' into other areas of law enforcement concern.

I propose this mental exerise at this point: imagine such an arsonist 'registry', and further, imagine 'community notification'. Especially in the lower South and in the Southwest, if a wildfire breaks out and homes are destroyed, consider the position of someone who has gotten onto a widely-defined ' and internet-accessible arson registry' (perhaps as a kid you once set fire to an outhouse or a trash-barrel in a local park) ... you see where things could go.

And suppose that the California Senate decided to amend the State constitution to the effect that traditional constitutional protections apply to all Californians except registered arsonists ... and you see where things can go.

OFFENDED BY GOD


Let me make something clear: It has never been my intention to flog the same subject. And my first interest has always been the war and Our relation to the government. But that’s exactly how I got interested in this ongoing sex-offense mania: In trying to figure out how the hell We could have gotten bamboozled not only into Bush but into this war – and how many of Us even came to feel it was a Good Thing, I was profoundly rattled when I noticed that the same bamboozlement had been thoroughly field-tested in the sex-offense mania of a decade or so before. And, it appears, is still going on – so that the same capacity for (self-)bamboozlement that was first exercised in the sex-offense mania is still going strong, even as the war-mania which is its offspring starts to pass (which is not at all to say that the consequences of our binge while in the war-manic mode are going to pass).

It’s hard to get one’s heart around: since the fall of the USSR in 1991, sixteen years following the Moment when a massive surviving chunk of the awfulness of the 20th century suddenly melted into thin air, presenting a world-wide opportunity of almost miraculous proportions, and the United States allowed itself to become consumed in the assorted Outrageous Emergencies of the various Identities, not only thereby missing the chance to exercise a truly nation-mature role in the reformulation of the planet’s political and social being, but also so deeply deforming its own ethos and praxis that when at last a belated U.S. effort to engage the new world situation was made, it was – almost prophetically – monstrously deformed into a violent, invasive, military thrusting that even in its death throes destroys the lives and souls of all who come into any contact with it.

Meanwhile, the planet – true to History’s dynamic nature – has refused to simply play the backdrop either to the assorted Advocacies’ set-piece melodramas or to the military’s set-piece warfare. The planet’s ecology is starting to tank, and that danger is so stupendously awefull that even the warning signs of a fading U.S. economic hegemony (or even security) must accept second-place in the claim for Our attentions.

So why keep coming back to this sex-offense thing? Because it was here that Our debauchery was set in place. And almost any of Us who can read were sentient during the past 10 or so years that this thing has metastasized, AND probably thought that the sex-offense thing was a Good Thing even as We enjoyed the brief giddy thrill as matters – like a roller-coaster car starting the down-phase – began to gather speed in their race to the bottom. And perhaps, like the proverbial schmuck falling off a tall building – We won’t feel anything but exhilaration until the very last couple of stories. ‘So far, so good!’.

In which case, the last stories coming up pretty quickly in all of the various stories in which We now play a part, then a more than cursory consideration of this sex-offense stuff might help Us understand how We were debauched, are debauched, and have helped to debauch Ourselves. Thus soberly fortified, We might better take such corrective action as are still open to Us.

So, to today’s article in Salon “Churches slam doors on sex offenders” by Eilene Zimmerman (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/04/26/sexoffenders_church/), and it’s a very useful piece of reporting indeed. I’ll just tick off points as I go through.

One preacher reports that he gets calls “every day now about this”, the ‘this’ being so-called Christian congregations greatly put out by the presence of sex-offenders who want to worship. This particular preacher runs “Keeping Kids Safe Ministries” in Tennessee. And I think that’s part of the problem. First, there is only one Christian ‘Ministry’, and that is the Ministry to proclaim and live-out the Gospel. All good things flow from that or they won’t flow at all. This tendency, seen more on the Protestant rather than the Catholic side of the aisle, is a not-unnatural result of the Protestant tendency – untrellised and unfenced by strong, thick doctrinal and sacramental wood – to grow like kudzu in all sorts of directions. Which, in the American setting means ‘marketing’ of ‘services’, and ‘marketing’ means offering stuff relevant to whatever is the rage, craze, or preference of the moment.

Second, there is a queasy theological problem evinced in the thing: The Christian’s job is to be faithful to the Gospel, and then God is trusted to work things out in history – and if those results are not to the faithful’s liking, then faith still requires them to accept His will. Now this is not an either-or sort of thing: Faith does not preclude Works or actions. But it’s ever an American weakness to emphasize the Works/Actions over the Faith and to market either as effectively as possible.

The preacher goes on to say that “we train about 50 churches a week”. Something of an overstatement, surely – as is so much related to sex-offense stuff. Unless mailing out a couple-three brochures and pamphlets qualifies as ‘training’, then this ministry must be more complex than the Department of Defense. Or maybe a tad of ‘sharing’ or ‘venting’ or ‘testimony’ counts as such ‘training’. In any case, the self-attributed ‘train’ is too generous, and more than a tad misleading.

A rabbi defends his sending a legal letter to a convicted and released child molester refusing the man (as always) permission to worship: congregants had come to him, “in pain” and what else could he do? The trumpery of “pain” – the expectation and the demand that one’s feelings take precedence over any other considerations, rational or legal or moral or spiritual – is a development of recent decades that has created havoc with the very foundations of our society and culture and the very foundations of Law and Justice. Nor have any of the moral, spiritual, political, or legal guardians stood against it. Indeed, there are schools of ethical, spiritual, political and even legal thought that think ‘feelings’ should trump. Yah. We felt so bad after 9-11; naturally, we felt it was OK to launch a pre-emptive invasive war based on falsehoods. Our ‘pain’ was so great; surely the world would understand; surely nobody would have the insensitivity to complain. Surely.

“A congregation is a very big family”, the rabbi goes on. Well, no it isn’t. A family is a family. A congregation is a bunch of people – individuals come together, called together by God, on their journey through Time, in order to deepen and share their Faith and their faithfulness. Once again, the American myopia is to Flatten matters into the realm of Action and Appearance, of the Familiar: thus the congregation is a ‘family’ and the preacher/rabbi/priest is ‘Daddy’ (or – feel free – ‘Mommy’). No. If people have come into a worshipping community expecting to find a ‘family’ or having been led to believe that ‘being a family’ is the great, beating heart of Faith then the horses have already come out the wrong end of the gate. ‘Family’ is a genetic bond that unites its members on levels far far deeper than our poor power to fully comprehend; consequently it is naturally and by definition ‘exclusive’. This is not quite the case with a worshipping community that has come together because of God’s call, and not because of any secondary or tertiary or quarternary considerations: I had a bad family life myself and want to make up for it, we all drive expensive cars and have nice houses, I like the glass windows in this church.

A professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University (you remember Duke) “says that the ingtegration of sex offenders is simply not discussed in mosque communities”, but if it were he “says it’s likely it would be difficult to allay the fears of parents”. Once again, the loose and dangerously inaccurate use of terminology: a ‘sex offender’ – legally – could have committed or not-committed a vast range of acts, of which acts against children are only one possible subset. But, as noted elsewhere on this site, I think that this conflation indicates far more than sloppy mental discipline; it also reflects the awesomely unsettling fact that the sex-offender mania has fed off the same poisoned roots as the old soviet ideological lust for erecting a class of “objective enemies”, any one of whom can be made to ‘stand in for’ all the rest as an object of the ‘anger of the masses’.

Another preacher, trying to get his congregation to agree to accept a repentant and time-served “convicted sex offender”, is surprised “that so many members of his congregation had been sexually abused as children”. Hmmm. How would he know? He proposes an unconventional plan, and suddenly scads of folks raise their hands and say they had been abused … nor will any of them expect to have to prove that assertion. Is that wise? To accept these claims at face value in a situation where the sudden-revealer has something to gain? And as ever, what constitutes the ‘abuse’? Not only is the definition monstrously elastic but the diagnostic criteria in the extant self-diagnosis, self-help books are so broad – not to say universal – that almost anybody would qualify. Are you uncomfortable in the presence of hot coffee and you don’t know why? … Well, it’s because you were abused (Daddys drink coffee … See? It’s science!).

But the preacher then goes from being a victim to being part of the problem: he “estimates” that a quarter of his female congregants and a tenth of his male congregants were sexually abused as children. These sex-offense numbers always raise more questions than they purport to answer. How does one ‘estimate’? If the definition of one of the prime variables (‘sexual abuse’) is so elastic and variable itself, how can you do any extrapolation?

Of course, if this preacher were to ask any of the foregoing questions – either as to proof of or even the nature of any individual claimant’s “abuse”, or if the preacher were to put up a blackboard and start trying to crunch some numbers, that preacher would be instantly cut off as being ‘inappropriate’ and ‘insensitive’; lawsuits might well follow.

Just where the soul-searing demands of the Gospel end and congregants’ far less spiritual motivations take over, is a question crying out for answer. The inability of nominally Christian faithful to extend forgiveness to a sex-offender indicates both a besotment with soviet scape-goating and a less-than-deep appreciation for and commitment to the Gospel of Christ. Now when you think on this, you get an inkling of why some – and not a few – folks thought that Jesus being killed might not be such a bad thing. (No, I don’t mean because the crowds are Jewish; the Gospel crowds are ‘Everyman’ (or woman … to borrow a phrase.)

And, as the article wonderfully points out, the chances are excellent that the congregation already harbors numerous sex-offenders in its midst (just about equal to the number of men in the congregation, some feminists would insist); it’s just that most of the sex-offenders haven’t been caught yet (another assertion with which feminist wisdom would entirely agree). After all, even on their own report, the purportedly victimized congregants must be sharing a lot of space and time with such offenders if so large a proportion of them have been abused/molested. Either that or their town is fuller of wandering zombiefied Strangers than a 1950s sci-fi horror flick. But of course, it is always Politically Incorrect to do the math, even of the victims’ or advocacies’ own claims. When Hitler claimed that he was invading Poland because a couple-three ‘Polish soldiers’ had invaded Germany and tried to take over a radio station, no Good German was expected to pull out a map and ask how such purported Poles got there. And can We wonder how We all got diddled by the run-up to the Iraq war?

One preacher, struggling to persuade his congregation to let in a registered sex-offender, claims “After all, he’s human just like everyone else”. The shocking thing about this comment is that it needs to be made at all; are there congregants who think that he isn’t? But of course. And we can thank demonization and the soviet class-objectification for that. Such strategies, rooted in primal human darknesses, have succeeded monstrously well among Us.

And finally, as one congregant and mother of an 8-year-old girl gasps: “Evil has already touched our lives”. This declaimed upon her discovery that “this individual had been worshipping among us and we had been unaware of it”. Surely the gentleman would not leap upon somebody in the middle of a hymn? Where is the actual danger here? Or is it rather the primal pleasure in defining oneself as being not-Evil?

If so, then who among Us, especially today, can stand at that Latter Day? Or even next Sunday?

IS JESUS OFFENDED?

It has fallen to Neela Banerjee to report on something that anybody with even a moiety of marbles could have predicted: trendish congregations of Christians are now bethumped by the problem of what to do with sex-offenders returning to the fold. (www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/us/10pilgrim.html?hp).

This, as noted above, is a problem whose arrival was even more ‘foretold’ than the arrival of the revered Jesus Himself. And the least of the reasons for such certainty is the increasingly-classic American societal dilemma of the Returning Prisoner: society – especially after its Twelve-Year binge on Olde Lock-em-up – is suddenly finding itself confronted with the presence of a man (almost always a ‘man’, and many many of them) who has paid his ‘debt’ (presuming he was rightly convicted in the first place) and now returns. This can be awkward.

But it is especially true of the soooo vividly highlighted subset of the Returning Prisoner: The Returning Sex Offender. Because if the sex-offense binge was fueled by the hot, volatile sorta primitive furies that feed on the sacrifice or expulsion of the Black Sheep, it was sublimely lubricated by the dark, viscous pleasures of demonizing some ‘other’, raising him (again and again) up, and therefrom deriving – pathetically and cheaply – an increased sense of one’s own self-worth and righteousness.

It was a great party. But now – who knew? – he’s back. And that’s awkward. After all, having defined him in his very essence as a demon (wasn’t that part of the thrill – triumphing over the ‘demonic’ and thus not needing to feel guilty about whatever necessary means it took to do so?) as part of the plan, how now to encounter the gentleman socially? What does one say to a demon at whom one can no longer with impunity take an immediate whack with torch or pitchfork? What does one say to a man upon whom, after sober (if very private) reflection, one might perhaps in the event have heaped rather too much retributive opprobrium?

And all of this dense complexity prescinds from a further and even more unsettling pair of variants on the Theme: The Angry Returned Prisoner or – so profound a development as to be almost intolerable to the immature believer – The Spiritually Evolved Returning Prisoner. One here approaches ‘challenges’ that reach the sublime perplexities experienced – at least for a soul-stopping moment – by those burghers who had gone home that afternoon after the events of Calvary and figured that, whether a good job or a bad, the thing was over with and life could go on … only to receive intimations of a resurgent Eternity by Monday morning.

All of which sounds like legitimate ground for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or half-a-dozen other classic authors, should anyone have the time for a night-course or an internet university adventure. But this is now – shades of 1950s television dramas and horror-flicks! – and somewhat the same situation is facing more and more ‘average Americans’ and their ‘communities’, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public and friends, blearily peering out the window at Main Street the morning after their binge.

If the situation constitutes a conundrum in fundamental civics as well as good manners and etiquette for the members of ‘his’ society, it constitutes – sadly, surprisingly – a profound challenge to fundamental beliefs for far too many of ‘his’ fellow Christians.

You wouldn’t think it would have to be like that. After all, the aforesaid Jesus of Nazareth famously placed great store in the company of sinners and – not to put too fine a point on it – apparently felt that the two great and interconnected unifiers of humanity were Grace and Sin, the former being largely occasioned by the robust persistence of the latter. The ‘saved’ and the ‘sex offenders’ are sisters (brothers, more accurately) under the skin and – if we might indulge a moment’s quaintness – ‘in the eyes of God’.

None of which would be news to them Kathliks. Ever mindful – even if sometimes absently – of the fundamental unity of humankind through Grace and Sinfulness, that Church could never and never did presume to usurp the ultimate authority to separate the sheep from the goats in this life. Such hubris was one of the abysses that the Church avoided (although she hit a hefty share of potholes on History’s road).

When the assorted Protestantisms of the Reformation broke up the orchestra and the several ‘instruments’ tried to play the Great Symphony’s entire score themselves, it was conceptually inevitable that in the urgent effort to be not-the-Roman-Church each group would select what it liked and drop what it didn’t like. It was psychologically inevitable that in so doing, each grouping would allow this or that less-evolved and primal human tendency to influence its ‘choices’. Indeed, having freed themselves from the ‘trellis’, the vines spread out every old which way. Such marvelous diversity.

What would become the ‘mainstream’ Churches under the Protestant umbrella retained a shape sufficiently similar in doctrine to the old Christendom or at least sufficiently compatible with the congregation’s host nation that some of the advantages of a ‘trellis’ remained to them. But the less mainstream – almost by definition more radical – groups became prey to oddness and extremes not only in doctrine but in emotional and psychological functioning.

Thus the tendency of these groups especially – among all the various religious subcommunities – to indulge and embody the primitive human emotions and strategies associated with defining themselves through selecting, demonizing, and warring-upon ‘others’. Indeed, looking at very recent American history, it cannot seem illogical – seems almost logically inevitable – that the Roman Catholic ‘big tent’ approach to salvation would have to be attacked as the ‘fundamentalist’ Ascendancy clawed its way to national prominence and influence. And so it came to pass, especially when an alliance of opportunity, a synergy, developed between the ‘conservative’ fundies and the ‘liberal’ secularists and – the trump! - the anti-hierarchical or anti-‘male’ elements within the Catholic community itself.

It has ever been one of the least mature and least impressive human tendencies, that our species – an uneasy, unstable, unfinished marriage of soul and body, spirit and mind and emotions and passions, presided over by a ‘self’ that has to learn Mastery and Command as best s/he may – finds it far simpler and in some deeply limbic sense actually pleasureable, to short-cut the Long Maturing and its attendant pains of uncertainty and frustration by achieving ‘identity’ defined not by what one has become but rather by what one is n-o-t: an ‘other’, a ‘sinner’, an ‘unbeliever’, an ‘enemy’, a ‘sex offender’ (or a ‘communist’, or an ‘injun’, or … fill in the blank).

Thus to some extent the sex-offense mania. And, like its nephew the Iraq War, what a ride it has been! But the binge is over, and the light of the morning-after is revealing the consequences of the night’s festivities. Thus the perplexity of many of the ‘saints’ among the Protestant fold. Having long ago cut loose from the ‘judgment’ and the guiding ‘canons’ of the Roman Catholic vision, having in compensation raised up the familiarity of a particular ‘present’ and a particular ‘way of life’ as clear evidence of salvation-achieved, having disowned their sinfulness as surely as the descendants of the robber barons in their assertion of respectability have disowned their forebears’ ferocious rapacity, having raised up this or that ‘idol’ as a rock of comfort and self-assurance against the fluid and stormy uncertainties of human life, the assorted Protestantries are baffled by the return of sex-offenders claiming a place at their spiritual table.

God’s grace was long ago taken for granted through the self-declaration of having been ‘saved’. Spiritual maturity was long ago replaced by the demanding, divisive insistence of ‘victimhood’, in favor of which the clarion and profound fact of our common creation was suppressed and abandoned.

So now, what to do? The sex-offender having pretty much been substituted for the devil, how now let him (again, and again) back into church? Does one allow ‘the Devil’ into church? Does one remonstrate with the ‘outrage’ of a sex-abuse claimant that God’s grace and the Christian responsibility to adapt to the uncontrollable wideness of God’s mercy and the common sinfulness of us all do thus utterly outweigh ‘pain’ and ‘outrage’, ‘revenge’ and ‘closure’? Worse, can one afford to admit that in simply raising such questions the spectre is raised that the congregation has debauched itself in a certain feral and this-worldly primitiveness, to the great detriment of its own integrity before God?

One such sex-offender, having served his time and now seeking to worship in a California congregation, is apparently supposed to dialogue with several members of the congregation who were abused as children. He did not commit a sex-offense against any of them, indeed was not a resident of the State or the region when they were abused. So what has he to do with the purported acts committed against them? The only answer can be that he is somehow a ‘symbol’, or a ‘group representative’ … like, say, a ‘bourgeois’ or a ‘kulak’ or an ‘imperialist running dog lackey of capitalism’. Any one of them will do for venting the people’s outrage against the whole class. This sort of thing is surely familiar, although not only un-Christian but – oh my! – un-American. This is what has happened to Us. This is how far We have fallen.

Several ministers – apparently Unitarian (UCC) and mostly female – admit themselves perplexed, but not in need of guidance. One opines that “you can’t be all things to all people”, that serving the spiritual needs of sex-offenders and ‘survivors’ of sexual abuse are “two conflicting ministries”. Apparently Jesus was not supposed to have spoken with Romans and Jews simultaneously, or perhaps He should have assigned the Romans to one of the disciples. Perhaps He was not to have eaten with sinners and tax-collectors and those sexual-service providers who were that era’s ‘sex offenders’.

“Can an offender who accepts Christ truly change?” asks the article, faithfully echoing a question posed by one of the interviewed divines. It’s a question, alright. Who can define what ‘accepting Christ’ means in the present fundamentalist bazaar? It would seem that if gays can be prayed into being straight, then sex-offenders finding a more appropriate way of finding satisfaction wouldn’t be such an impossible project. Perhaps while visiting the imprisoned is some sort of a work of mercy, a mitzvah even, actually praying with ex-prisoners is an abomination (the scriptural basis for that claim might be a stretch, but the fundamentalistic mind is nothing if not elastic).

Opine other pastoral persons: we are trying to create a “safe” church, and “people think of the church as an idyllic paradise and now we’ve lost something”. “Safe” – safer than it was when the Soviets were daily expected over major and minor US cities with their incinerating radiation? Safer than it is with the prospect of regional or world war breaking out in the Middle East even as we speak? Safe from sin? If this last, then where can one be safe and who, except a desert-island hermit, is safe from the evil that humans do?

It is an ancient Roman Catholic belief – deeply in sync with the Framers, come to think of it – that the dignity of the individual human being and his (and her) liberty requires that the community must live with a certain risk that that liberty will be misused. While the Church and the Framers may have differed as to the source of human dignity and rights, the result was much the same: the price we all pay for our common freedom and dignity is the risk that some of us will misuse it. And while we may civilly punish actions, we are not free to make determinations as to the state of any individual’s soul now or in the future, nor are we permitted to pre-emptively punish putative possible and potential malfeasance. We are not even allowed to do such things to errant human beings in order to satisfy our ‘peace of mind’ or our sense of ‘safety’ or our conception of ‘closure’ or our personal definition of ‘justice’.

Back in the day, it was assumed that one’s vibrant faith in God and God’s Grace would help ease our misgivings and spackle up our faith and our fortitude as we made our pilgrim way toward Salvation. But of course, God and Grace and faith and fortitude have taken quite a beating of late. It is not a stretch to imagine that fundamentalists and victim-advocates have made this world far more morally unsafe for believers than sex-offenders have made the world physically and emotionally unsafe for children. And any sex-offender who has harmed more children than the Deciderer has harmed Iraqi children … should certainly be behind bars at the earliest practicable moment.

The fundies and the advocate-revolutionaries cannot have it both ways: they cannot declare their this-worldly concerns, no matter how urgent or well-intentioned, either trump or are totally congruent with God's will, and at the same time claim that they are in contact with an otherworldly or superworldly 'authority' that has deputized their efforts. We are all liable for Judgment, reagardless of our presence or absence on this or that 'registry'. And we all deserve it. Pray.