Creating Sex Offender Registries: The Religious Right and the Failure to Protect Society’s Vulnerable

Steven R. Morrison, State of Maine Supreme Judicial Court

Abstract

Abstract: “Creating Sex Offender Registries: The Religious Right and the Failure to Protect Society’s Vulnerable”

By Steven R. Morrison

This article argues that sex offender registry and notification acts (SORNAs) fail to protect those in society who are likely victims of sex crimes. These laws fail to protect these potential victims because they emerged as a result of the rise of the Religious Right, and so answer to the imperatives not of public safety, but of conservative religious sexual norms.

The claim that SORNAs fail to protect potential victims has been made before. This article adds to the scholarship by placing the advent of SORNAs in the historical context of the 1980s and 1990s rise of the Religious Right. Most or all previous articles have implied that the only historical events relevant to the advent of these laws were a few high-profile crimes against children such as Megan Kanka. While these events may have been catalysts, I was not satisfied that such a simplistic historical answer was complete.

My discussion of SORNAs’ historical context suggests that SORNAs are another method among many others by which alternate sexualities (those that are non-marriage-based, non-procreative, non-heterosexual, and/or non-monogamous) are repressed and the conservative Christian sexuality of marriage-based procreative sex is reinforced. By focusing on this repression, SORNAs fail to adequately protect potential victims of sex crimes, especially children.