Laws Not Worthy of Democracy Must Be Abolished!
RSOL Must Not Be Divided By Petty Differences!

- by Alex Marbury

We are a broad coalition, and coalitions are very hard to keep together as they grow. RSOL is certainly having growing pains. We keep adding signatories - now we have about 920 signatures for our broad reform statement. Non-signatory participants also come on board every week. Yet we have also experienced some division and bickering recently. This is normal for any organizing effort as large and diverse as ours, with more than 30 state groups. But we must keep our focus on bringing about change soon, and we must not let our differences keep us from doing that. There is room for a broad variety of strategies in our movement, and we need to be tolerant and encouraging of each other - but we cannot waste time in name-calling or questioning each other's motives.

The need for sex offender law reform is more urgent than ever. Some states keep adding worse and worse features to the registries. There are increased residency and other restrictions, which make it virtually impossible to find housing or jobs for former offenders. There are more and more people in America's Siberia - the so-called civil commitment camps. Thousands languish in those camps, cut off from family, often behind barbed wire, and deprived even of the simple rights afforded prisoners, because of the laughable fiction that these camps are not punishment. As a Swedish observer wrote recently (Blog No 018): "The laws to register people for life [in the U.S.] are a 'fascist idea', and not worthy of a modern democracy." Yet these awful laws do not surface on most people's political agendas - whether conservative, libertarian, liberal or radical! So far, President Obama does not seem to notice them. Even as he tries to do something about Guantanamo, Cuba. What RSOL Virginia organizer Mary has called 'Virginia's Guantanamo' is totally ignored, as are all the other internal sex offender Gulags. Despite brave protests, places like Coalinga and, just last month, Farmville, Virginia, remain dirty stains on America's conscience. At Farmville, detainees are denied even towels, bedding and decent food - and must pay exorbitant rates for anything they are allowed. Yet their recent petition to the Governor of Virginia, which Mary sent to every state representative and to major media in Virginia, was absolutely ignored. We simply cannot stand for such silence in the face of what we have clearly identified as an evil aberration in American justice.

And RSOL will not stand for it! We will move on now to the next level - abolition of the shameful and shaming public registries and the punitive commitment camps, at both state and national levels. The first RSOL national conference last July, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Austin, Texas, were a successful start. We got to know each other, we heard from the top US legal and mental health experts, and we began to craft a common approach. We will now move toward the second national conference, set for next June, in Washington, D.C., where we will 'come out' into the public light and meet those in Congress who are our adversaries as well as those who are potential allies. No more sidetracks! Get ready for Washington, RSOL! Watch for specific dates and the agenda in the December Digest and the RSOL e-Magazine.