If there is an epidemic of drooling pedophile lechers hanging around the beaches, it's news to me, but maybe Maine is different:
York Police Chief Doug Bracy said the statute would represent a fairly minor change that would help keep the public safer, especially children. He noted that York police respond fairly regularly to reports of public peepers on the town's beaches.
Our editor wants a comment about this insanity in which, as Van Helsing puts it, "the government wishes to regulate your eyeball movements."
People are sexual beings. We are many other things too, but that's one thing that we are. We have been given a strong dose of it, and it isn't seasonal like most animals. Is human sexuality "appropriate"? No, often it is not. Nor is human aggressiveness, nor is human fantasy in general.
That's why we learn to keep fantasy in fantasyland, and to keep our behavior in the real world, where the real consequences happen.
One thing that bothers me about the neo-puritanism of the radical feminists is the disingenuous blurring of sexuality with aggression (the wording of the Maine law is a perfect example of the perverse blurring).
At the risk of sounding perhaps too non-traditional for Maggie's, unconscious and sometimes conscious erotic fantasies know no bounds of gender, age, morality, law, or social appropriateness. Everybody knows this and everybody has experienced this, on some level. Socio-cultural taboos, conscience, mental mechanisms like repression, laws, consequences, judgement, the balance of normal impulses, and conventions prevent most of us from behaving like monkeys. Not to mention the fact that we have other interesting or necessary things to do.
However, people who sexually prey on kids are not so much sick as they are simple criminals. Unlike the ancient Greeks, and for better or worse, we have laws about these things.
Break a law, become a crim. It's your choice. But this Maine law, designed to make it easier to prosecute "peepers" as felons satirizes itself. Obviously, the potential for abuse by paranoid Moms is part of the issue here. How does anyone discriminate a peeper from a looker? Everybody likes to look at cute kids, and that is what the neo-puritans can't tolerate.
Is "looking" an action? Not in my book. If it were, I'd be on death row for all of the visual daggers I have thrown.
Editor: More from Dr. Helen, and Moonbattery: Government to regulate eyeball movements.
Related: The pub ogling crisis in the UK
Photo: Would the feminists permit this famous and utterly innocent ad today?
