I mean guidelines. Guidelines for where to use the laws…

Or did you think the police and CPS applied the pure law of the land honestly and without regard to other matters..?

I haven’t allowed it to warp mine, either. I’ve suggested that, where guidelines need to be tightened, they should be tightened.

*shrugs* It’s also still very much a minority view. A tiny, tiny minority. Mostly confined to ‘Guardian’ readers and social workers.

So unless you can somehow manage to persuade a majority of the population to ‘love the sex offender’ (not going too well, is it..?), we’ll keep locking them up, persecuting them and shaming them in the media.

Julia, I sympathise with your attitudes, but I think they’re based more on gut revulsion than dispassionate logic. It’s a subject that’s bound to provoke a strong emotional response. But the preservation of liberty and the values that underpin western civilisation depend on us being able to take a strictly rational approach.

John’s is the more rational view.

Sadly, no. We probably wouldn’t…

Given that that would make him guilty of indecent assault in and of itself, either you’re misstating the facts as admitted by Langham or the prosecutors trying him were inept.

However, I’m not a fan of “W has been acquitted of X, but he probably did Y, so we’re going to punish him for Z…”

You’re behind the times. The Lords voted against the strange thoughtcrime that HMG were trying to introduce to make almost all adverse comment on homosexual issues punishable, but in reading the debate I noticed that this little gem seems to have slipped through in front of it. If I have read what their Lordships are saying correctly, it would seem that you are now going to be able to be locked up for having an image of/looking at something that consenting ADULTS do (nothing to do with the child stuff on which this discussion majors) , that is in itself legal to do, and even if the image is of yourself and your partner doing it. Totally weird, especially if you read the whole thing. It makes the overful bin case conviction sound positively sane. Right out of left field, this one.

The really funny side is that maybe Max Mosley can get the News of the Screws people locked up for having their pictures of him!

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/80421-0015.htm

When we were in Rome on holiday, we looked at all the lovely buildings (esp. Pantheon – highly recommened!) but I drew the line at the Colosseum, that’s a hideous building that was built in order to kill and torture people.

It’s like rocking up at Auschwitz, looking at the gates and saying “Hmm! Nice wrought ironwork.”

Yes… Gordon Brown, for instance. Someone tell me what’s going on in that head!

We need a much more rigorous justice system which tries people on the basis of their conduct. Not their thoughts, fantasies, or dreams.
What did they do? is the question.

We must steer clear of this “thoughtcrime” nonsense. Who the hell knows what is going on in someone else’s head?

Why not?

Because he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions.

I agree with you there Anna. There is a serious problem, which I think is most blatantly manifest in the mainstream media, of selective forgiveness. I think of it as the “one of us” syndrome. It is the same mentality that drove Bernard Law to start playing switcheroo with his paedophile priests, and subsequently allowed him to retain his status in the Catholic church after his betrayal of trust was unmasked.

But this double standard has become only too commonplace in our society. Celebrities have been convicted of murder, manslaughter, drunk driving, drugs, paedophilia, rape, neglect, speeding, assault, and firearms offences. Why should we let them off the hook of public scorn?

The MSM never let Myra Hindley off the hook did they? ( Not that I would have it any other way, I hated her like stink.)

But I don’t like seeing offenders “re-habilitated” just because some dork in Fleet Street wants to hang on to her “perils of Amy Winehouse ” mealticket.

Apparently, common scum sinks to the bottom, but superscum rises to the top.