Posting #75 – My Right to Worship, by Jonathan

By: Jonathan
Date:  05/05/2009

Imagine you lived in a country where your every move was subject to the intervention of the State. Imagine that the State's jurisdiction over your daily life even extended to your religious life and that the State could determine the conditions under which you could attend a house of worship, or whether you could attend worship at all.

I do not have to imagine such a circumstance. It is a reality of my daily life in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I am a registered sex offender. Because of mistakes I made over ten years ago, I am now subject to a bewildering, and ever-changing mass of rules and regulations that extend to every area of my life. The Commonwealth may enforce any of these regulations at any time, but has no obligation to tell me what they are.

One such law, passed in 2008, Code of Virginia Statute 18.2-370.7 (2007, cc. 284, 370; 2008, c. 781.), Section B. This statute prohibits my presence on any property I know to house an elementary or secondary school at any time. The only exceptions are if I am a student in the school, am on the premises for the purpose of voting, or have obtained a court order and am in compliance with the conditions of that order.

Most Churches of any size have some sort of preschool or private school on premises. No exception under the law is made for the fact that the property is a Church. I spoke to an individual who was present at the hearing where this law was passed and was informed that the legislators were fully aware that they were effectively prohibiting sex offenders from attending religious services. They briefly considered an exception that would permit a sex offender to be on the property fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after the service (apparently no thought was given to the possibility that a sex offender's religious life might go beyond simply listening to a sermon once a week). The legislators decided that there was no issue under the Constitution because a sex offender could always seek a court order if he wanted to participate in religious services. I recently sought and obtained court permission to attend events at my daughter's school. She is a senior this year, and I wanted to attend her concerts and graduation. Because I am willing and able to prepare a petition and represent myself before a judge, the only expense was the filing fee of $28. Should an offender need legal representation to do so, he can expect to pay in the neighborhood of $1000.

Most Church leaders are unaware of the implications of the new legislation. Because the Commonwealth of Virginia is under no obligation to inform registered sex offenders of the passage of laws affecting their status, many sex offenders aren't even aware the new law may apply to them. I am not personally aware of any arrests having been made for Church attendance, but would not rule out the possibility of such arrests occurring. I recently spoke to my minister about the new law, asking him to encourage the Church to speak out as an organization against this attack on a Constitutionally protected right. His reply was that I might not want to open up this issue, since many ministers are very conservative and would be likely to agree with the exclusion of sex offenders from Church.
Sex offenders are not infrequently re-arrested, but those arrests are far more often for technical violations of the complex array of registry laws than for new sex crimes. As the laws get ever more numerous and complex, this trend can only be expected to increase.

Recent major studies by the Departments of Justice in New York and New Jersey revealed that Megan's Law has had absolutely no effect on either child safety or recidivism. Patty Wetterling, the mother of Jacob Wetterling in whose name the act allowing Internet access to sex offender records was passed, has gone on record as stating that these laws have gone far past their original intent. Nonetheless, state legislators, motivated by political concerns, continue to pass additional laws, even as many admit that the laws and the registry have become largely ineffective.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection Act has made matters worse. The state of Ohio serves as an excellent example. Prior to the adoption of their version of the AWA, Ohio assigned levels to sex offenders based on a risk assessment protocols that included involvement of the courts in the decision making process. Ohio has now adopted the AWA-mandated system which bases an offender's tier level solely on the basis of the crime of which he was convicted.

Virginia has done much the same. In an effort to comply with (and exceed) the requirements of the AWA, the state recently reclassified some 90% of their entire sex offender population as "Violent", the highest risk level to which one may be assigned. People who had for many years scrupulously complied with all registration requirements and who were originally told that they would have to register once a year for ten years were informed that their new requirement was to renew registration four times a year for life. The new "Violent" classification had numerous other ramifications, including the banning of their presence from schools, and as I have noted above, many Churches.

Proponents of Megan's Law and its offshoots answer that, "if the sex offender didn't want to have to comply with the registration requirements, he shouldn't have committed the crime." This is tantamount to informing an individual whose crime may be decades old that he should have anticipated that he would be facing a wilderness of ever-changing laws, and a state of lifetime unsupervised probation. Many of the sex offender registration laws are designed specifically to exclude and stigmatize the offender for life, and are strongly reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws in the South in the years before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

The response from Churches and religious organizations has been deafening silence. Granted, taking up the cause of sex offender rights may not be a politically popular move. However, only the most short-sighted can assume that actively blocking every effort of a person who has committed a crime and paid the price from making a new start can lead to a satisfactory outcome.

Jonathan