I have plenty of sympathy with the concerned parents in these congregations. On a case-by-case basis, their predicaments all seem fairly understandable and their decisions reasonable. Morally ambiguous, to be sure, if you take the doctrine of redemption and rebirth seriously, but reasonable. It's a part of the messiness of life to which even the Godly are not immune.

However, being removed from any of these actual situations, in which decisions have to be made for the good of the specific people in their specific places of worship, I do worry that the fact that we are sending these sex offenders out on the street and expecting them to avoid all areas where children might be present (which, as far as I can tell, is everywhere), barring them from any significant source of social support, isolating them, and making the stigma of their past so strong that living an honest life is akin to living no life at all might-just-might be a contributing factor in their high recidivism rate relative to other crimes. When our absolute certainty of their incurablity is so strong and virulent, how likely is it that we are creating for ourselves an extremely dangerous self-fulfiling prophecy?

I did note that this article consistantly refered to sex offenders as men. It's true that the majority of convicted sex offenders are men, but there are women sex offenders. Are we less afraid of their presence among us? Do we take their crimes less seriously? Or was this just a case of vague pronoun usage?

Also, why was it that the only congretation for which racial composition was noted happened to be the one that "includes several members who went to prison and after release came back to church, including former prostitutes, drug dealers, thieves and murderers." Was the fact that they are "racially mixed" being mentioned to support the idea of how tolerant they are, and if so, is the one type of openness (to the presence of former prisoners) reasonably comparable to the other?

Not necessarily interpreting nefarious intentions here. Just a bit annoyed by vague language and a few odd reporting decisions.

First, a pedophile is technically someone who is interested in sex with pre-pubescent children. Someone who tries to have sex with a 14-year-old (or Miss America pretending to be a 14-year-old) is still doing something wrong, but it is not a case of pedophilia. This distinction is important in determining treatment and prognosis for sex offenders.

And isn't it a bit creepy that a woman chosen to represent American ideals of beauty can effectively pose as a 14-year-old (in person, not in the pictures she sent over the internet, which were of her as a teenager)? There's something contradictory about our culture's equation of youth with beauty and it's extremely powerful taboos against sexual activity with and among the young. I'm not saying that adults should not be prosecuted for soliciting sex with adolescents, just that our larger culture seems somewhat complicit in the problem and pathologically unwilling to own up to that.

Also, I think someone else already clarified this, but the article was not objecting to police capturing sex offenders. It was objecting to making a sensationalized television show about it. The shows encourage us to be fascinated by the idea of sex between adults and teenagers without examining how our fascination with this type of act might be part of the problem.

How does one become a "pussy" in a non-"gender relative" way?