For reasons that these three crime-fighting quill-smiths either overlooked or cautiously avoided, such a law, if ever passed (and that’s dubious, at best), would have to be written in such a way that it only applied to a registered citizen’s prior residences. And, as time passed, these residences would grow in number and ubiquity as registered citizens move here and yon. Fast forward 20 or 30 years and there would likely be registered addresses all over the state, and lots of unregistered people living in the former addresses of registered citizens. These innocent people would have no idea why and no legal remedy to free themselves, or their property, from the stigma of registration.

Or let’s think of another “hypothetical” that is more likely to suffer from the stupendous and absurdly moronic opinion that has issued from the mind of not one, but THREE, “educated” journalists in Halifax County. My registered address was once the same as my mother’s. Now that I have moved, her home address is no longer associated with my registration. That’s the way it should be.

But I do occasionally visit my mother. And I typically stay the night in her home at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes even for the New Year holiday. It would be tremendously burdensome for me to track down a legitimate law enforcement agency on Christmas Eve just for the ridiculous purpose of letting them know (and ostensibly the entire population of the planet) that I was planning to spend the night at my former registered residence which just also happens to be my mom’s, a home built by her dad and sitting on property that has been home to the family since the 1820s.

The Herald‘s suggested fix to this newly discovered “loophole” would not serve any legitimate public safety purpose but WOULD merely expose an elderly citizen of North Carolina to potential threats and harassment by the very people the editorial staff is likely to inflame: gun totin’ sycophants who remain whipped into a psychotic frenzy by the constant drumbeat of sex offender paranoia that has gripped the nation for more than two decades (beginning with the now laughable histrionics of alleged satanic rituals involving children in the late 1980s).

There is not a great deal to worry about here. Not only is the Daily Herald‘s readership abysmally low, but the suggested fix would likely find its way to the first garbage receptacle in legislative bill drafting after staff attorneys got done with it. But what is most disturbing is how far out of touch the media increasingly seems amidst a growing consensus among legal and academic experts that our nation’s policies regarding people formerly convicted of a sex offense are based on false statistical data and an unreasonable (and unsupported) level of fear among rank and file Americans.

But it’s that very fear that the editorial staff intends on fostering. Fear sells newspapers. And boy do they ever need to sell a few!

I have just had a lesson in how far those who are opposed to our advocacy are willing to go to suppress the truth.

This started exactly a month ago with this op/ed in the March 13 online edition of the Longview, WA Daily News. RSOL wrote a rebuttal, received assurance from the News’ online editor that she would consider it, and sent it off. After a week of hearing nothing, receiving no response to inquiries, and not finding it online, it was posted on this blog and a link sent to the News’ publisher. The online editor responded on March 23rd that it would be printed sometime that week. When I looked for it on the 24th, imagine my surprise when, instead of the rebuttal piece, I found another op/ed defending their first op/ed supporting public registration. I updated my blog entry, and she was immediately contacted about the rebuttal piece; to the best of our knowledge, no response was received.

I looked every day; she was written again on the 29th, and, again, no reply was seen. March turned into April. On April 10th both she and the publisher were emailed with an inquiry. She responded the next day saying that she had replied on the 29th and that the piece had been printed on March 25th. She sent the link and, sure enough, there it was!

How could it have escaped our attention? We scoured the dailynews.com site every day looking for it. And how was the email of the 29th overlooked? We will never have an answer to the second question. The email has been searched repeatedly, and the searches have turned up no communication from her or anyone at the News on the 29th. If she did indeed send one, it has dissipated like the morning dew in mid-summer.

We can, however, answer the first question. It escaped our attention — and our fervent hunting day after day — because it appears to have been buried. It was not listed with other pieces printed in the Opinion section. If we had known what they named it, we could have searched on their site and found it. But no one else could have found it. No one else could have seen it. No one else could have determined that it existed in order to find it in order to read it.

When it was printed, all of the hyperlinks to the studies cited were removed. But then if no one will be reading it, no one will need any links to click, will they? Additionally, every op/ed printed there that we saw has a comment section. The rebuttal piece has none. But if no one will be reading something, they won’t be commenting on it, will they?

Just out of curiosity, we looked at other types of articles on the site. Whether it was news or sports, opinion or entertainment, it has a comment section. Even the articles taken from AP have comment sections. Certainly we did not look at every article they have posted over a lengthy period of time, but we looked at many, and every one looked at has a place to leave a comment. Only one was found with no comment capabilities, and that is the one rebutting theirs.

So that leaves only one question for the Longview, Washington Daily News: Did you bury our op-ed? If so, what are you afraid of? What do you not want people thinking about if they read that article? What do you not want people seeing if they click the links and read a couple of research studies? What do you not want people saying if they left a comment on the article?

What are you afraid of?