Hello, I've been reading your posts for a while. This shall be my first post in this forum (I just registered yesterday) so I'll give you my vision of the whole thing as illustrated:
The issue of child molestation is a tricky one, and one that must be discussed with as much rationale as possible because even though it deals with non tangible things such as a child's feelings and emotions (Which are clearly corrupted and permantently affected after the act), we must try to clear ourselves from what some people have defined as "witch-hunting" and the whole issue of condemning a human being and labeling him as a "Bad Person".
The truth is we have created a culture of sexual repression. A culture of repressing our very basic instincts, and somehow the tables got turned on us.
Indeed, as many people pointed out already, everything in our culture has the word "****-me-right-here-right-now" written on it. You just need to walk a few blocks away from your home to see it on every single banner and ad. On the subway, on the bus, on your computer. It's the female body once and again used to sell stuff. And paradoxically, the ages of these women seem to be going under and under and under as the generations go by. A friend of mine defined the current advertisement as a needle that pinches you everyday with the message "Have sex, have sex, have sex".
So maybe we should take a moment and really, seriously try to understand why we do the things we do. Because I think we all have our little demons. And with this I'm not saying we're all pedohpiles deep inside. What I am saying, however, is that we're all potential pedophiles. We're also potential murderers, potential robbers and potential anythings. We have all the possibilities inside of us: the good ones and the bad ones.
So answering to this question:
"The original question was if a convicted child molester does his time and when he gets out and its ten years later and he has not committed the crime again should he be forced to move out of his wifes house so that he can be more than 70 yards from a school bus stop and where can he go to achieve this? Also say he does find such a place and after awhile people with kids move in the area and should he have to move again?"
I think that, like any other law, it should be reached by general concensus. I don't know if it had (I'm assuming it did). If it did, then the majority has decided that a child molestor has to change his whole life from now on. Too bad for him, but that's the price you pay.
But a law is a law. The good thing about a law is that it works. You catch someone shoplifting and he or she will go to prison. That's simple and it works. And for a while that's good. But we cannot spend the rest of our mankind settling up with that. We need to investigate our true human nature. We should develop (If it is that they don't exist already) rehabilitation centers for pedophiles, with therapists who patiently and kindly analyze the patient, who ask him about his childhood experiences (A great deal of child molestors were actually molested in their childhood), who dig deep into their life and try to reveal to them what they did.
I strongly believe there is no such thing as "Bad People". There's only Blind People. We have all done bad things, sometimes deliberately. ALL of us. That doesn't mean we're bad. It only means we don't really capture the significance of what we're doing. We haven't really internalized WHAT is it we're doing and WHY we're doing it. Children are the best examples of that. When my brother was like 8 years old, he and his little friend got possesed by a throw-every-old-toy-you-can-get-your-hands-on-out-the-window frenzy. And he was telling me, now that he's an adult and he's married, that back then he really wasn't doing it with a bad intention. He wasn't really conscious of what he was doing. He was just having naive innocent fun. To him, that wasn't really bad at all. He didn't find out until the next day when he got punished. So from an early age we learn we do bad things through the experience of guilt. I think that's something to take note on.
Try not to compare this literally to what a pedophile does. A pedophile is obviously an adult. It isn't like he wasn't aware of what he was doing. Same thing with a serial killer, who methodically plans his every move. It has nothing got to do with being aware. It's more about internalizing what you're doing. And to do that, you really need to do some sort of meditation. And it's really hard. We all struggle with that. Like the guy who smokes and he knows he's killing himself but he can't stop. You know, my dad tried to stop smoking for decades, literally decades. And one day, at like 52, he just quit. And I got the feeling that he simply internalized what he was doing and he realized he just wasn't interested in wasting his life breathing on a little piece of nicotine.
So what I think we need to do is two separate things: One one side define the laws by which we govern our actions whithin society. That will clarify the rules of the game. But that isn't enough. That is why on the other hand, we, each one of us individually, really need to meditate on the actions we do. Raping children is just one of endless mistakes a human being (any human being) can make.
And I think everyone really needs to ask themselves the question about "Bad People". Because I think that's where the whole Supersticious-Moralizing-Mental Bull**** starts to take over.
