chezodysseus.blogspot.com : 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 were forbidden by the State (and the US) constitution.
The US Constitution still forbids retroactive laws. 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, 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 pyramid would collapse like a Ponzi scheme.
...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 politicians 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.
