Buck Hill

Those wacky Minnesota Republicans -- previously seen forbidding poor people from enjoying themseves and attacking F. Scott Fitzgerald for being less wholesome than comic strip children -- are still plugging away at their long-term goal of making their midwest-progressive liberal home state into Mississippi with snow (and a dose of Plymouth Colony Puritanism -- a decent jury-rigged fit with the otherwise bland Lutheranism of the state that still retains the strictest blue laws this side of Connecticut):

Castration proposed for sex offenders

Serious sex offenders who prey on children in Minnesota should be subject to court-ordered castration -- surgical or chemical -- a group of Republican legislators proposed Thursday.

"At first glance that may seem to be a little overboard," said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, chief sponsor of a bill introduced in the House to promote what he called "asexual rehabilitation" for pedophiles. "But it would control the urges that they cannot control themselves."

Honestly, these people play the political game with such naked cynicism that it's occasionally surprising, but damned if it ain't effective. The Republican legislator method of Crime Prevention is to pick a group that most people don't like (child molesters, poor people, smokers), and promise swift and righteous punishment for them. The legality or effectiveness of the punishment as a deterrent (or even as a plain old punishment) aren't the issue -- even getting the damn bill passed isn't the issue -- it's being on record as strong-to-the-point-of-sadistic against immoral behavior of any stripe. It may as well be Witches they're going after (surely Wiccan Schoolteachers or some other such nonsense are on some wannabe State Senator's Get List for the 2006 campaign) for all the difference it makes to victims and perpetrators of actual crimes (or to those lazy welfare mothers or murderous smokers -- not to mention the dreaded single-mother/smoker/welfare-recipients who eat junk food). So you just have to come up with some off-the-wall ripped-from-Nathaniel Hawthorne punishment for any invented/overblown threat to decent (read: white) hard-working (read: economically comfortable) moral (read: suburban two-holiday Christian) folks, and those people will say, "gee, I don't see the Democrats coming up with a solution to the shoplifting crisis or those people in the city who take public transportation to public schools to DEAL DRUGS -- I may not agree with everything Mr. Emmer says, but I do know that he shares a similar distate for drug dealers," and then the Eliminating Bus Lines Taken By Drug Dealers To Public Schools Act of 2005 is passed by the House to great acclaim, and anyone with any sense moves to New York and watches their home get taken over by toothy assholes with talk show host hair who talk friendly to th' white folks while destroying the cities for their crimes, chief among them being having too many disenfranchised brown (and red and yellow) people without money. And the Democrats (who in Minnesota borrowed the name but not the principles of those lamented old socialists the Farmer-Labor Party) will run the undying, immortally useless spirit of Hubert H. Humphrey, taken human form in his clone-children Buck Humphrey, Skip Humphrey, Biz Humphrey, Fab Humphrey, and Zeppo H. Metrodome Humphrey-Terminal, all of whom are unthreatening to either business interests or the nationally funded and professionally groomed Republicans they'll lose to. Finally, the dream having been achieved, we'll all have a statewide celebration at the Capital to unveil our new slogan, Minnesota: South Dakota Without Tourists. |