[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
In a rebuttal printed as an appendix in the report, the State Department noted that there was no evidence anyone on that list had traveled in order to commit a sex crime, and that it already has the authority to deny passports to people convicted of sex tourism involving minors and those whose probation or parole terms forbid them from traveling.
“We think the report is very misleading,” the State Department wrote. “Starting with the title, ‘Passports Issued to Thousands of Registered Sex Offenders,’ we are concerned that it conveys more ‘shock value’ than factual accuracy.”
Read the article by Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project.
Adding a mark to passport of people in the registries is adding more punishment and humiliation for an offense that they have already paid for with prison time, parole, and fines. The person paid for his offense (even some that were falsely accused), but legislators want to keep punishing them. Why do we want to keep punishing people after they have already paid for the offense? That is not what the Bible teaches us and that is not what the law is about. Stop it; stop wasting this country’s resources. The US is the only country that publishes the names of offenders on the Internet. Those names are on the Internet for the rest of their lives even for minor offenses. Do people know how many hundreds of millions of dollars these non-sense registries cost? Adding marks to the passports will add to that cost and we all pay for it. Stop wasting our resources.