all-encompassingly

Yikes.

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.

I’m all for locking up and tracking sex offenders. I fail to understand why we don’t lock up child molesters for life or why we let rapists out of jail… But this new Ohio law is just ridiculous.

Although the law applies only to “sex offenders” right now, in five years I’m sure the government will see the need to create a civil “drug dealer” registry, etc etc. (see: Patriot ACT and meth dealers as well as RICO and businesses that employ illegal immigrants)

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 rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio’s so-called Megan’s Law.

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.

Talk about a bargaining chip in divorce settlements. “John, if you even try to contest custody I will get you civilly declared a sex offender. How would you like to have to tell all your new neighbors that you have a thing for young children?”

If this wasn’t absurd enough, consider that this whole idea came from the Roman Catholic church in an effort to avoid lawsuits. Sad.

The concept was offered by Roman Catholic bishops as an alternative to opening a one-time window for the filing of civil lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse that occurred as long as 35 years ago.

“Constitutional liberties? Oh, please! We’ve got the church coffers to protect!”