(Insert title here)
There was, last month, an episode of the popular anti-war comic
Get Your War On that considered the terrorist watch list:
David Rees, Get Your War On, July 16, 2008
It seems to me that a similar notion might apply. Unless I am missing something specific about their offenses, it seems to me that you are proposing that
adulterers, such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards, ought to be on a sex-offender registry. I would suggest that this would demean the registry, in both ethical and functional aspects.
Start with the proposition that, wherever there might still exist laws criminalizing adultery, it would only harm the intended purpose of the registries—to inform citizens about potentially dangerous people in the community—to muck up the list with so many names. After all, if a cheating police officer arrests an adulterer, he might also face a future arrest. A unfaithful district attorney might someday face adultery charges of his or her own. Judges? Jurors?
On the one hand, adulterers generally tend to justify their behavior in some way: their partner was withholding, or perhaps unsatisfactory in, sexual contact; perhaps they reject monogamy in their own relationship—I am acquainted with at least one acknowledged open marriage, and have known many who sleep around in general. True, I would agree that these people probably should not have bothered with marriage in the first place, but neither my morals nor interpretations of law and circumstance are authoritative.
Perhaps if one does not trust his wife, for example, it might be desirable to know who in the neighborhood is a serial adulterer.
From my own viewpoint, I would not see my child's mother punished in such a manner for her own transgressions (she was married from the time I met her until after our daughter was born, which created certain legal headaches, anyway). More than her unfaithful tendencies in any allegedly-monogamous relationship, I would consider the psychological corruption at the root of her moral deviancy more important than the mere fact that she has, in the past, committed adultery. Nor would I consider judicial sanction for that deviancy to be profitable. The point, in her case, should be to repair the psychological corruption that motivates her lack of integrity, which course would not be well served by cornering her and forcing her to defend her current condition.
And, to consider my own history, I would think the three marriages I have intruded upon to be lesser considerations than other occasions. Much as I consider the sodomy I have participated in over the years insubstantial, so it is with adultery. Of more concern, I would think, would be instances of public sexuality (indecency or lewd conduct), and while I personally don't hire prostitutes, I see no reason why those friends of mine who do (two known, another broadly suspected, and a fourth in whose case it would not surprise me at all; there is another, as well, who I know hires sex, but that friendship, such as it was, I terminated for other reasons—the first time, perhaps ever, that I have deliberately terminated a friendship), should be considered
dangerous sex offenders. I would, after all, prefer that they negotiate a fair price for sexual gratification than go out and steal it.
Considering the intended purpose of a sex offender registry, I cannot see the benefit of mucking up the list with so many names of people who, by and large, are not any more dangerous than our everyday liars.
