}On a side note, when are we going to have theft offender, murder offender, assault offender, female assault offender, property damaging offender, and reckless driver offender registries?…….{

EXACTLY! Which list will we EACH find ourselves on?

Long before Hitler killed the first Jew in Nazi Germany, he paved the way for the wholesale disenfranchisement of human beings by — you guessed it — attacking the rights of sex offenders. From 1933 through 1936, a series of amendments were passed to Paragraphs 173 through 188 of the German Penal Law specifically targeting homosexuals and others determined to be “sexual deviants.”

The sex offender laws created under the Nazi Third Reich may as well have been the model for “Megan’s Law.” They established the first sex offender registry, required sex offenders to register their whereabouts and to wear pink triangles, and established draconian punishments for sex crimes that included long prison terms, loss of voting rights, confinement in concentration camps, and (sometimes) the death penalty. All of these laws were justified by the Nazi’s in the same way that our present-day politicians justify Megan’s Law: to protect the children from sexual predators.

Of course, Hitler had other things in mind, as history shows us; and targeting sex offenders was just a way to establish the precedent of wholesale deprivation of human rights in preparation for his later attacks against the people he truly hated.

It’s doubtful that the German people would have acquiesced to Hitler’s rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and so forth, and sending them off to death camps in 1933 when he first ascended to power. Hitler had to first establish a precedent that some people were subhuman and unworthy of human rights — and he started with the most universally despised group he could find.

Anyone who thinks that this couldn’t happen again is delusional. The simple fact is that history shows that you can’t single out one group for deprivation of civil rights without weakening those rights for everyone else.

Comment by Liberty Lover — May 7, 2006 @ 8:54 am

From: http://portlandme.wpadmin.about.com/?comments_popup=257612:

Giving up your rights that millions have fought to KEEP just so you can ‘feel safe’ is the very definition of cowardice.

btljooz