Brutally Honest Rant - 08/15/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: No Place In GA For Genarlow
Audio Transcripts
08/15/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

You know, one of the big problems for commentators like me is that trying to discuss certain issues is at times difficult… because we all live with this damnable sound byte mentality. If it can’t be delivered in ten seconds, some of you folks just don’t get the whole picture and you simply go by what quickie morsel you pick up and then react on it as if you knew the whole thing.

So I’m sure that some of you will get pissed off with what I have to say on this subject, because this is something that you really have to put some thinking into. And yes I mean for more than just ten seconds.

There was a local issue that came up just a couple of weeks ago on the case of one Genarlow Wilson. Genarlow was a local high school athletic “HE-RO”, which of course is just nothing more than just small-town hype. And like many over-hyped athletic players, Genarlow believed that he could pretty much do ANYTHING that he wanted! After all, he’s a “superstar”! He’s UNTOUCHABLE!

So one New Year’s Eve, Genarlow and his buddies are having a little private party in a hotel room and there are a couple of hot chicks involved. It’s New Year’s Eve, there’s drinking (illegal of course), a bunch of dudes, and some babes. I mean, come on, do I have to paint a picture as to what happens next?

And this is where Genarlow makes three SERIOUS mistakes.

Mistake number one… one of the hot chicks is FIFTEEN YEARS OLD! Now it would be one thing if she was sixteen… that’s the age of consent in Georgia… or even seventeen like the other girl there. But she was FIFTEEN! I don’t care if she’s drunk, drugged, brain-dead, sleeping, or stone cold sober, wide-awake, and willing… if her age is younger than sixteen, then any kind of carnal activity with her is ILLEGAL, PERIOD!

Mistake number two… is that they RECORDED it! Hey, I can understand… you’re having the best damn time of your life and there are a couple of hot chicks willing to help you live out your darkest fantasies, oh hell-yeah you’d want to record that for posterity! But combine that with the first mistake and you have two things… the first being EVIDENCE of a criminal act… and the second is child porn.

Mistake number three… he should not have gotten oral gratification from the fifteen-year old and just had sex with her. And I’ll explain why in a minute…

You see, the next day, the older of the two girls, the one who was seventeen, said that she was raped. She went to the police; the police investigated the hotel room and found all of the evidence, including the video. So they charged Genarlow and his buddies and it goes to trial. His buddies rat on him and take deals. He fights it to the end. The jury acquitted Genarlow of the rape charge for having sex with the seventeen-year old girl. But they convict him of having oral sex with the fifteen-year old girl.

And here’s where mistake number three comes in. If Genarlow had just intercourse with the fifteen-year old girl, then he would have been guilty of a misdemeanor offence and served maybe 12 months in jail, if that. But because she gave him what Monica Lewinsky once gave President Clinton, Genarlow was guilty of a FELONY with a mandatory TEN YEAR PRISON sentence as well as a lifetime scarlet letter on his name for being a sex offender.

Now you’re probably wondering how that became such a damnable offense when regular intercourse would have been just a couple of months in jail, right? Well there’s really no mystery behind that. That’s one of those stupid hypocritical freedom-hating moralist games… and if you took the time to seriously research the whole thing you’d probably find that it came after some TV or newspaper report of kids giving oral gratification to older guys and some local moralist thugs deciding to make that their cause of the moment.

Anyway, Genarlow is in prison to serve his mandatory ten year sentence, and his attorney has been desperately trying to change things so that Genarlow’s sentence would somehow be changed so that he could get out of prison AND avoid the stigma of being a sex offender. His buddies took a plea deal and they get to have parole and the sex offender stigma, but Genarlow is sticking to his stance that he did nothing wrong and that he shouldn’t be in prison to begin with.

So now what I am going to say next is probably going to piss off a lot of people if they don’t think things through, but it really needs to be said after looking at the bigger picture.

I think that Genarlow Wilson would be better off staying in prison.

Now don’t get me wrong, boys and girls, I sympathize with his plight! I really do! Hey, hormones and booze never are a good combination to begin with. And it has absolutely nothing to do with race or the fact that he was an over-hyped high school athlete.

It has EVERYTHING to do with this very caustic neo-Puritanical environment that Georgia has falling into, thank in no small part to the redneck Taliban mentalities that infest this part of the country.

Let’s get brutally honest here… Genarlow Wilson and his convicted buddies are marked men. They are convicted sex offenders, and in the State of Georgia, they pretty much have no place to go BUT to prison. And yes, it IS intentional. It IS deliberate. It IS intended to be that way!

You see… Georgia is one of those states that have enacted some of the most totalitarian laws when it comes to ANYONE convicted of a so-called “sexual crime”. They are not allowed to be within 1000 feet of ANY kind of church, school, park, playground, mall, or unofficial bus stop. Anyplace where kids can gather, these men and women are expressly PROHIBITED from being near. They can’t even LIVE or WORK in those general areas.

Want to set up a business? Not in this state! If you set up a business and you’re a registered sex offender, all that it takes is the start-up of a nearby church or day care center to shut your business down, even if your business was there first! There’s a guy by the name of Anthony Mann who tried to do that and he was forced out of business TWICE, and each time by an arriving day care center!

There is a man in Augusta who will be spending the rest of his life behind bars because he is a registered sex offender and he actually COULD NOT find a place to live! Thanks to these moralist laws, the only place he could stay in was at a hotel, and he couldn’t afford to do that! HE BECAME HOMELESS!!! And because he no longer had a legal residence to report to the police, the police picked him up and put him back behind bars, where he will now be in for the rest of his life!

THIS is Genarlow Wilson’s future, boys and girls! Not just ten years or even two years behind bars… but a LIFETIME conviction! And he won’t have to do a single damn thing to get that lifetime conviction! All he’ll have to do is EXIST and he’ll be convicted.

And I know that some of you are thinking that all that needs to be done is to somehow find a way to let Genarlow Wilson’s felony sentence get changed into a misdemeanor conviction and he’ll be free with time served and without that damned stigma! Well folks I WISH that it were that easy, because in the bigger picture it is not.

Sure, it might buy Genarlow some time… a couple of years at best. But he’ll still have a target on his back, because he’ll be known as someone who “beat” the system. And the people who created that repressive system and actually MADE it as draconian as it is today WILL NOT allow that to continue. They will make an example of Genarlow. In fact, they’ve already tried to do just that with them trying to make the evidence of that case public… not caring, of course, that they were breaking federal laws against child porn in the process.

The moralists and their corrupt friends in the government will not stop with simply targeting people convicted of felonies. This is just a trial balloon for them; a test to see if the courts will allow them to take it even further. If it passes judicial muster, then they’ll raise the stakes. They’ll raise the barrier from 1000 yards to 2000. Then 2500. Then a mile. They’ll expand the forbidden zones to include residential neighborhoods, hospitals, treatment centers, anyplace where a child MIGHT be located. They’ll expand the law to include those convicted of misdemeanor sexual offences. So that “little youthful indiscretion” of yours when you were caught by the police for skinny-dipping… or caught banging your girlfriend in the backseat of your dad’s truck… or pulled over for flashing your boobs or butt out the car window… that will become part of the latest legal leprosy. They did it for past felonies and they can apply the same argument for previous misdemeanor convictions. If it’s on the record, it’s fair game to them.

These moralists, these preachers and politicians and social crusaders and so-called “concerned parents”, have one simple goal. They want to criminalize anything sexual in nature and then BANISH it either out of the state or into a correctional facility. They can’t come out and say it, of course, because it exposes them to being no different than the Taliban in Afghanistan. So they have to do it in piecemeal, knowing full well that as long as the masses stay ignorant and the masses stay scared, they will eventually get their way.

Now I’m not saying that Genarlow Wilson was an innocent young man caught up in a bad law. He did something stupid and he did something criminal, and he does need to pay for it. But there is a distinct difference between a sex-based crime and being a sexual predator, and this is the line that has been intentionally, deliberately, and systematically blurred by preachers and politicians and prosecutors and police officers and members of the ego-driven media. You punish him for the crime. You don’t punish him with a lifetime of condemnation and Taliban-style discrimination for simply having a libido.

What Genarlow Wilson did was wrong, and, in fact, criminal. But the greater injustice is NOT the ten-year prison sentence that he is serving, but rather the lifetime conviction that was needlessly added to it. As long as that is still in existence in this state, people like Genarlow Wilson would be better off staying in prison, on the taxpayer’s dime, for the rest of their lives.

You want to help Genarlow Wilson out? You want to REALLY help Genarlow out? Then you make sure he has someplace to go WHEN he gets out other than back to prison. You work to REDRAW that line between sex and a sexual predator. And then you TARGET the preachers, the politicians, and the prosecutors who have been deliberately blurring that line for their own gain. You go after them and you get them out of their cushy positions of power so they can’t pull this kind of a stunt ever again. THEN, when Genarlow serves his time, you can say that justice has truly been served.

(Computer – something evil)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Somewhere in this whole debate the concept of actual JUSTICE is missing. Justice is not about payback. It is not about revenge or protectionism. It is about correcting an imbalance in society. Someone does you wrong, they need to make up for it. THAT’S where the whole idea of an eye-for-an-eye came from!

The problem here is that conservatives have abandoned the concept of justice to the liberals and then embraced this perverted mixture of revenge and protectionism. If you think about it, they actually adopted a socialist stance and are calling THAT “justice”.

With that kind of philosophy behind it, is it any wonder why their ideas for dealing with crime are bound to fail?

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

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