A friend of mine from Long Island recently informed me that the New York Times has started a series of articles on Iowa’s groundbreaking sex offender legislation. Iowa has been driving a bandwagon of states who are drafting laws to keep sex offenders from living within 2000 feet of various locations such as schools, day cares, and churches. Using these restrictions some cities including my own have pushed sex offenders clean out of their limits and into living in country trailer courts, farm houses, highway motels, tents or their own vehicles. The tighter Iowa towns’ laws become the more laws that are being passed in Illinois and Nebraska to avoid a flood of sexual predators entering their states.
I say this is a fantastic piece of legislation and Iowa is being quite proactive in addressing the issue and a role model for other states. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of my fellow Iowans agree with me. Sex offenders commit crimes most often on vulnerable children so removing them from the proximity of children is not only a great idea, it reduces the constant temptation. As my friend from New York said “There is no way they could do that in New York.” Yep, there are to many of them and it’s to liberal of a state which is precisely why Iowa is taking care of business now rather than later.
However the New York Times doesn’t follow the same internal code of ethics and common sense that the rest of us do, which is why they are running a piece bashing Iowa’s stand against sexual deviance. This article graced the front page of the New York Times today and will be syndicated nationaly, it is full of sob stories. Such as one from a Sheriff Deputy who has to spend a whopping 20 full hours a week monitoring sex offenders locations, or one from a family who lives across Highway 30 from a rural motel that has 26 sex offenders living inside. These deviants have to move somewhere when they are herded out of Iowa’s cities and if they don’t live across from some rural family then they will move to Baltimore or Oklahoma City, or any other non-Iowan city. Having a roach motel with 26 of them across from you in the country is unusual in Iowa, most farms have no neighbors for a half mile in any direction. If that nice family really wanted to shake things up, they would get a license to host a day care in their home, then just watch all the cars pull out of the hotel as the Sheriff tells those scumbags to “Get!”. Don't move away, make the scum move again! Iowa’s offenders will always live close to someone, and finding one of those people to build an entire article around to bash our intolerant stance on predators is just the modus operandi of the New York Times to create hysteria in support of the dregs of society. Oh and of course the exalted Des Moines Register has even ranted on the push against sexual deviants, why should they care about Iowa as a whole if they can generate hysteria and sell papers? Both of these papers are no strangers to pandering to criminals.
The New York Times plays up how some sex offenders are “disappearing” and law enforcement does not know where they are living, they have just stopped checking in or moved out of the state. Is that not a good thing? If they stay in the restricted areas they are subject to heavy fines or imprisonment if caught and if they leave…well that is the desired result. If they move to say, Tennessee they won’t be calling back to check in with the Polk County Sheriff’s Department thereby making them “disappeared”. The Times fails to mention that though and cries about the hardship caused by the legislation and claims that there has been no benefit to Iowa.
I must have missed the press outrage when Iowa towns used the 2000 foot rule to keep away porn shops, booby bars, and to double penalties for drug dealers because they have been doing that for years.
Here are a map showing restricted areas in Waukee Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines: Waukee (pdf file), and here is the Des Moines ordinance detailed.
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