The difference in how sex criminals are treated can be striking.
They might be considered scum or perhaps some kind of fluffy media curiosity. The deciding factor must be gender.
For example, the State of Illinois took the right step recently in ordering corrections officials to quit concentrating paroled male sex offenders in South Side neighborhoods where group homes had been located.
The reaction was totally understandable. Keeping kids or other loved ones out of harm’s way nowadays is hard enough without importing potential predators.
Yet on a good day I might try to work up pity for some of the offenders and the fact that no one wants to be within 1,000 yards of them.
After all, not all sex crimes are created equal.
I’ve read of young–though technically illegal–love between teens ending up with the male being convicted of a sex crime and being branded a sex criminal.
But in cases of hard-core sex crimes, where youth is stolen and innocence destroyed, those perpetrators are easy to despise.
And that makes the wedding watch of Mary Kay Letourneau all the more galling.
There has been no indication that the former schoolteacher’s Washington state neighbors have hounded her to leave because she is a sex offender who preyed on a 6th grader.
Not only that, but she apparently is laying in her new supply of wedding gifts.
Though the wedding date listed on her Macy’s bridal registry passed last weekend with no sign of a ceremony, the bride-to-be has made clear her intention to marry her victim, now 22, after having been interviewed extensively about their unshakable love on national TV.
Back in September, Letourneau, 43, appeared on ABC’s “20/20” to explain to Barbara Walters in the sweetest of terms the depth of the world-be-damned love that had developed between her and her former student, who at age 12 supposedly asked her if she was willing to have an affair with a schoolboy.
She was.
In the promo for that ABC interview, host Charles Gibson said to the warmly earnest Walters: ” . . . I think she wants so much for you to understand and to accept, and it’s difficult, but it’s fascinating.”
But would it fascinating if it were some 40ish male sleaze claiming to be head over heels for his formerly 12-year-old female victim?
I’m guessing not.
And we wouldn’t be watching it unfold on television, because it would be considered so universally disgusting that none of us could bear it.
Then the great irony of this marriage occurred to me.
For the last year or so the whole country has been in a tizzy about whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry or whether the very idea is immoral.
So far, the supposed moralists seem to be winning.
Soooooo, why are those same people not jumping in front of train wrecks like the Letourneau nuptials?
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Is this part of God’s plan, to sanction a union between sex-crime perpetrator and victim?
Why are people not marching and spitting?
A sex crime against a child is not funny, not cute, not warm.
It’s beyond disgusting. It’s the rape of a soul.
And the damage most likely will never go away.
But we’re willing to tolerate freak shows while denying the right of consenting adults to form a union in love.
Man, just when I thought I finally had this morality thing down, something like this happens.
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