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“Eventually everyone will be on a sex offender registry somewhere so it won’t quite the scarlet letter it once was.”

The teenage son of a friend stopped into a 7/11 and asked to use the bathroom. The clerk said no. It was late at night, so he stepped behind the store between the dumpster and the wall where nobody could see him and peed. When he came out a cop had driven up and asked him what he was doing. He said, taking a piss. The cop arrested him. There was no law against public urination so he was charged with exposure. Not knowing what would happen he went before the judge without a lawyer. He was found guilty and put on the permanent sex offender list. He was 16.

I recently pulled up the sex offender list for my area and there was somebody almost in square mile; hundreds of people in a tiny town. I looked at some of the write-ups and many were teenagers when they “offended.” How many of us would have been on the list if caught today for things we playfully did as teenagers with other teenagers? These things were no predictor of future behavior, nor were some of them overtly sexual at the time. Teenagers have scatological and wave-the-penis humor that goes away with maturity. How many lives have been ruined by this well-intentioned but ridiculous law? When everybody’s on the list, nobody’s on the list.