The United States Senate Quietly Passes Another Unconstitutional Sex Offender Law
Politco: Legislation passed without fanfare in the Senate Tuesday night would require convicted sex offenders to register their email addresses and IM screen names with a government-controlled database. The Senate version of the bill, known as the KIDS Act, is intended to make it difficult for sex offenders to join social networking Web sites like Facebook and MySpace. The act is just one of many Congress is considering as it takes aim at sex offenders. Beyond the KIDS Act, there’s the Deleting Online Predators Act, the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, the Children's Listbroker Privacy Act, the Combating Child Exploitation Act and the Effective Child Pornography Prosecution Act. The KIDS Act (Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act) is joined by the SAFE Act (Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act) and the mother of them all, the PROTECT Our Children Act (Providing Resources, Officers, and Technology to Eradicate Cyber Threats to Our Children Act).
Is there anyone else out there who thinks this all has become ridiculous?
But civil libertarians say that the bill is too broad, that it could reach convicted offenders with little chance of recidivism. “Everybody wants to keep kids safe,” says Michael Macleod-Ball, the ACLU’s chief legislative and policy counsel. But Macleod-Ball said that the bill’s policy goals have to be balanced against the rights of individuals, and that each offender’s situation should be evaluated on its own merits.
“If you’re going to affect somebody’s rights, there’s got to be a connection to some sort of legitimate public policy purpose, and there are some people that are within the realm of the Senate regimen who would fall outside of that,” he said, arguing that it “makes a little more sense if there is a specific determination that’s made by the court or by some probationary or parole process that finds an actual nexus between the restriction you trying to impose and the nature of the conviction.”
The fact is: that it is illegal for Congress to devoid any citizen of their Constitutional Rights. The application of this law is another example of unconstitutional retro-active application of "post-facto" punishment and is clearly another violation of the United States Constitution. Contact the US Senate and Congress to tell them forcefully that we will not allow them to trample the US Constitution !
