From The Top

by - Alex Marbury

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Tasks

We of RSOL are ordinary people - just plain folks, from all walks of life. A very few of us have Ph.D.s, a very few have published books, and an even smaller number have achieved "fame" in one way or another. Mostly, we are the lady down the street, the guy who works at the supermarket, the high school teacher as well as the high school honors student - from every corner of the U.S., and far more from small cities and towns than from the large city, the centers of learning and culture.

We are more than 2000 strong now, with active groups in about 35 states, with more coming regularly under the dynamic leadership of Alain Levesque - whom you can see from the National Conference Videos is himself just a "kid," a university student. Many, though not all, of us are the family members and friends of people accused of illegal sexual activity. We are the loved-ones of the most hated people in America today. RSOL does not invite those convicted of offenses to sign our public statement, but we do encourage other forms of participation from people who have served their sentences and are trying to put their lives back together. Such people - from teens to adults, but mostly male - have been accused or convicted of 'sex offenses,' a catch-all term that covers everything from kids "sexting" on cell phones or having consensual sex with each other, and old men urinating in rest areas to serious crimes including child molestation and rape. Those at the more serious end are a handful. There is far more who have been falsely accused of such acts than who were in fact guilty. But, whether we are offenders or families of offenders, or are just civil libertarians who care about justice in America, almost all of us are working-class Americans who never were before involved in politics or social movements. We are 'just plain folks."

Yet we face extraordinary times and tasks. We have the daunting job of exposing the extreme injustices and rabid violations of the U.S. Constitution that have scapegoated and permanently isolated and humiliated a class of people most Americans still view as 'monsters.' America seems always to need a scapegoat to blame for its problems. It is an uphill battle to challenge this trend, to say a loud "no" to scapegoating! Even more extreme laws continue to be passed in some states, though we have managed to stop the worst of them. In Virginia, thanks to the RSOL leaders there, not one new sex offender law passed this year. And in Georgia, New Mexico, Ohio, Missouri, and many other states, some laws have already been blocked or amended in favor of civil liberty and justice. But these are extraordinary tasks in a very difficult time.

This is not the first time that ordinary folks have been asked to perform extraordinary tasks in difficult times. There were those who finally stopped Senator McCarthy in his anti-Communist witch-hunt in the 1950s. There were those who refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War and who worked for peace in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps, most similar to today's movement to bring sanity and justice to sex offender laws, was the Civil Rights struggle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Exactly fifty years ago, it was just as outrageous in the U.S. South to fight for human rights and equality for Blacks, as it is today to insist that sex offenders and their families are people, too, deserving compassion; to demand that such people are also citizens who must be afforded protection of the long-standing rights of U.S. justice,

Those who fought the outrageous laws of segregation - refusing people service in restaurants, even forcing them to leave the city limits at sundown in some towns in America - were considered, in 1959 - fifty years ago - to be eccentric at best, 'commie' deviates and traitors to the American way at worst. Those who went along for the Freedom Rides in 1960, and faced armed mobs - and sometimes death - were just ordinary folks, too, rising to an extraordinary task. Those days were bleak and difficult - before RFK and MLK had begun to give the cause its heroic leaders. The ordinary Americans in the trenches of sit-ins and protests all over America in 1959 could not know their cause would eventually prevail. Yet it did! A black man is now President of the United States. Yes, racism still rears its ugly head, but it is beaten back down as soon as it appears nowadays. What seemed unthinkable in 1959, fifty years later is common practice.

One day, those of us ordinary Americans who fight to reform America's sex offender laws and bring back the protections of habeas corpus, the Constitutional ban on ex post facto laws, the rights of privacy, freedom of travel, and the right to live wherever we wish - we will look back on these dark times as just a phase before we helped bring America back to her senses! Just as good, ordinary folks did in the dark days of the 1950s on matters of race and peace and the right of political association, we labor today for sex offender law reform in very dark times indeed. Yet, eventually our cause will prevail. It must, and it will! America will demand it. We ordinary folks who face extraordinary tasks in the sex offender law reform campaign will finally be able to move on to whatever the next challenge may be, to protect the rights of whatever scapegoat America chooses next. It is too bad this history repeats itself, but it always has. We can only hope that ordinary folks will be up to the extraordinary tasks yet again.