Rewriting The Scarlet Letter

.
A registered sex offender recently moved into our neighborhood. In the light of the murder of two Florida children by registered sex offenders in the past few weeks, his presence created a stir among Neighborhood Watch members last night.

Checking out flyers on the FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) website at http://www3.fdle.state.fl.us/sopu/index.asp?PSessionId=1071816846& , some members found that five registered sex offenders live within a half mile of where we were meeting; 72 live within our zip code.

J. made printouts of FDLE flyers on each of the five offenders; M has distributed the flyer on the closest one to affected homes in the neighborhood. I volunteered to post these flyers, copied directly from the FDLE website, on my own site. (As a service to the group I donate a small section of www.cowart.info to Neighborhood Watch affairs).

So, this morning I spent a considerable amount of time copying pages from the FDLE site and pasting them into a Word document for posting but for some reason the photos would not show up on the server. I asked Donald to come over and help me straighten out the problem.

He was able to repair my work in short order.

I was very glad that he was also able to repair my “Dog Stuck In Tree” photo.

Then he and I discussed the morality of my re-publishing the names, addresses and photos of these criminals especially since this information is readily available on the FDLE site and since I’ve had a link to that site in MED Watch stuff for over a year.

Shades of The Scarlet Letter!

We concluded that parents in the community have been adequately notified to keep close watch on their children and that the inclusion of such photos and information again would be immoral on my part.

Warning parents of danger to their children is one thing; that’s a moral, responsible thing to do. Hassling former prison inmates is another thing altogether; that’s being an immoral busybody meddling in other people’s lives.

Life is hard and the very essence of sin is to make it harder for somebody else than it really needs to be.

We decided that what I was doing was immoral, so we deleted all the work I’d already done and did not post the men’s photos for the umteenth time.

Sometimes it’s hard to know the moral thing to do.

P.S: www.cowart.info is now up again, and the new server should kick in this week.