Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.
Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

Now, I don’t know a lot of “best friends” who share bedrooms in an apartment that size, but fine, let’s roll with that part. What I want to note is that the (presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation that puppets “do not have a sexual orientation” is just manifestly false. Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples.

Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. The human characters Gordon and Susan were married from the outset (and later adopted a child), while Maria and Luis famously got married on the show.

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show.

What Sesame Street gives us, then, is a picture of reality (in New York, of all places) where loving coupled relationships are exclusively presented as heterosexual. That exclusion is a choice. And the implicit message sent by that choice is that the very existence of same-sex couples is, like swearing or violent street crime, an aspect of urban reality that’s inappropriate for children to be exposed to, unlike all the normal, unremarkable heterosexual couplings depicted on the show.

That omission is not neutral. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships on a show that otherwise routinely celebrates family is, in itself, a message and a value judgment. It relegates them to the category of shameful or unpleasant topics that are not to be mentioned in front of the children. Obviously, this cannot keep children from noticing that Uncle Ron and Uncle Pete live together, or that Heather from kindergarten has two mommies. But they will surely notice, at least subliminally, that those relationships never seem to make their way into the idealized world of Sesame Street—where the air is sweet, and evidently the sun chases away the gays along with the clouds.

That doesn’t mean Bert and Ernie, or any other particular pair of Muppets, need to have a coming out party. [And to clarify: Having been depicted as best friends for so long, it would probably be a mistake to retcon them as gay.]  It does mean that the makers of kids shows should probably think harder about what message they’re sending when they embed in their scripts a double standard about what types of affectionate relationships are “appropriate” for children to see.

Update: Doug Mataconis articulates what I think is the natural reaction to this kind of argument, which is that “the mission of Sesame Street doesn’t really have much to do teaching children about sexuality at any level.” Whether it’s the “mission” or not, however, that’s what it does. It’s just that when it teaches us about heterosexuality, the teaching is invisible.

As long as human relationships are depicted, though, something is being modeled and taught. We’re learning something about sexuality when Telly contemplates the possibility that Bob and Linda (who, incidentally, was for a long time the most prominent deaf character on television) will get married and have babies. We’re learning something about the nature of family when Herry Monster and his relations sing about the physical features he has inherited from each of them, or when a family of Anything Muppets sort themselves by age and gender. Not teaching about “sexuality” in the broadest sense is just not an option as long as recognizably human couples and families are shown with any regularity.

That doesn’t mean there needs to be overt discussion of sexuality, any more than the presence of black characters requires an explanation of the horrific conditions under which African slaves were transported to the new world, or how their ancestors won civic equality decades later. It just means that having a cast with human characters of multiple races is a choice, even if “race” is never discussed, and a choice that implicitly “teaches” something different from a show where non-white faces are never glimpsed, or where characters of different races are present, but never interact (even if, again, this fact is never mentioned). If the show had nothing but Muppets, of course, the question wouldn’t arise at all. But if, for 40 years, every human adult or child face on the show were white, we would not be much impressed with the defense: “Well, it is not Sesame Street’s mission to teach kids about race relations.” If the ideal community represented by Sesame Street were 100% Anglo-Saxon in a country that’s about 64% non-Hispanic white, the complete absence of race relations would be teaching kids something about race relations. That’s one reason Sesame Street has always maintained a diverse human cast—and taught kids something precisely by showing all these friendly neighbors who don’t ever have to bring up the topic of race.

Update II: From the comments:

I’m a straight, 42 year old, at home father of a 4 year old girl. She happens to have 2 loving aunts that have been in a committed relationship for over 10 years.
Watching Sesame Street a few months ago she actually asked me why there is “nobody who look like aunt Erin and aunt Sara”.

Here is a story I think we all agree describes something that happens all the time—though not as much as it used to. A young person who naturally feels same-sex attractions suppresses them—perhaps not even allowing himself to be consciously aware of them—because of overwhelming social or familial expectations and norms. They go on to have a series of heterosexual relationships, perhaps even marry. These are not necessarily a complete sham: They will often involve genuine love and affection, and even a modicum of sexual attraction sufficient to get a couple kids produced. Nevertheless, the person has a nagging sense that something is missing, and eventually comes to terms with their own repressed feelings. Though they may, for a time, have sincerely convinced themselves they were straight, they finally acknowledge that, deep down, they’re actually gay.

If we think something along these lines has often occurred, and continues to, then why would we rule out the possibility that it occasionally happens in reverse? Not, of course, because of overwhelming social pressure to be gay, but perhaps (as we sometimes hear in “ex-gay” narratives) some childhood sexual trauma or abuse that leaves the victim with a physical aversion to members of the opposite sex, which they confusedly take to mean they must be gay. It’s true, most self-described “ex gays” sound like they’re engaged in a religiously-motivated form of denial, rather than responding to some genuine personal epiphany about their inner nature. But if people who are actually gay can go years or decades convincing themselves (or trying to convince themselves) that they’re straight, surely it’s at least possible that some small handful of actually-straight people sometimes convince themselves they’re gay.

One obvious pragmatic reason not to want to draw attention to this possibility is that it creates an opportunity for conservative families struggling to accept a gay child or sibling to lapse back into denial: “Aha, maybe you’re the one-in-a-million who only thinks you’re gay! I just know it! How about a couple years of therapy?” The flip side is that makes all this “ex-gay” stuff properly irrelevant to larger discussions about sexual orientation without necessarily calling into question anyone’s personal narrative. We need not insist that a self-described “ex gay” is simply confused: maybe their previous gay identity really was an artificial construct in response to trauma. But that personal story also ceases to have any wider implications. Just as we’d properly find it ridiculous to suggest that, because some people are closeted and later come out, all heterosexuality is a form of denial or mental disorder from which people need to be liberated, we can laugh off attempts to draw inferences from the psychological problems of a handful of people to general conclusions about the larger number of people who really are gay. Not because we claim to know for certain that their private narrative is false, but because people are different enough that not every truth is a universal truth.

Update: Andrew Sullivan is unpersuaded:

So much of the culture and the environment and social pressure is for heterosexuality. It’s the norm. Very, very few people who are the norm in a society where the norm is overwhelmingly celebrated, are going to be in denial that they’re really straight. Maybe a few fluid lesbians in college. But that’s it. I can’t imagine a straight guy feeling in any way pressured to live a gay life.

As several commenters here suggest, part of the problem is an artificially sharp compartmentalization of sexuality into (100%) straight, (100%) gay, and (presumably precisely equally attracted to both genders) bisexual. And we know that doesn’t actually describe people very well. Indeed, we know most people are fairly adaptive, so that in gender segregated environments (prisons, boarding schools) people who in the outside world would exhibit completely heterosexual behavior will, after enough time, take their sexual gratification where they can get it. We can imagine a boy otherwise disposed to be straight who, as a result of some childhood sexual trauma, has a powerful averse reaction to anything approaching sexual contact with women, effectively ruling that option out. You’d have the psychological equivalent of being stuck in a permanent boarding school: Even if you weren’t or wouldn’t naturally be most attracted to other men, they’re what’s (psychologically) available. Strong as social pressure is, it’s not as strong as the human sex drive.

Again, I suspect this describes an extraordinarily tiny number of people, if it’s true of anyone. I’m just suspicious of the instinct to dismiss out of hand reports of human sexual or psychological experience that fall outside some small set of prefab categories.

As for the lying, I’m inclined to say that when you ask probing questions about someone’s sex life—and you’re not an active participant in said sex life—you generally shouldn’t feel entitled to expect an honest answer. Which means Weiner owes his wife an apology on that score, but not so much the rest of us. To be sure, Weiner shot himself in the foot here by claiming to have been hacked—and since “Congressman’s Twitter account hacked” is plainly a legitimate news story, one can hardly blame the press for following up and reporting on the falsehood of that claim. Exposing the falsehood was fair game, but the falsehood itself—insofar as it was directed at the public—I put in the same category as bowing out of a party because you’re “not feeling well” or “have a lot of work to get through” when you’ve actually had a raging fight with your partner, or have an appointment to get an embarrassing medical condition checked out. There are plenty of areas where most of us neither expect nor really desire complete honesty from friends and acquaintances, let alone public figures.

When it comes to the underlying behavior that story was concocted to cover, it seems to me there’s one person who’s clearly entitled to pass judgment, and I’m disinclined to usurp her prerogative. Megan McArdle sees a need for a round of public shaming lest we otherwise signal that this kind of infidelity is normal or acceptable. But this seems a bit presumptuous. Assuming they didn’t have some kind of understanding about this sort of thing, the wronged party here is Weiner’s wife. Maybe she considers it an unforgivable betrayal and is only waiting for the media glare to die down so she can file for divorce. Maybe she sees it more as a symptom of his sad, immature need for validation than a serious breach of the relationship. Most likely her reaction is somewhere in the wide terrain between those poles. Relationships are complicated, and people have wildly varied views about the types of sexual or emotional relationships outside marriage they’re prepared to tolerate, about a spouse’s verbal flirting or porn viewing, and so on. Either way, that’s her judgment to make, and I haven’t heard her issuing any public calls for the rest of the country to rally to her assistance in reinforcing norms of fidelity. I suspect that however she wants to deal with the issue, she’d rather do it behind closed doors than with the assistance of cable TV bobbleheads.

Finally, as Matt Yglesias points out, Weiner has a long track record as a public official which seems a lot more obviously relevant to evaluating his “character” qua public official than any of his virtual liaisons. Indeed, we’ve got half a century of social science that very strongly suggests that “character” is pretty domain specific. Which is to say, the fact that someone is scrupulously honest (or not) in their business dealings isn’t a very good predictor of how well they’ll behave in other contexts, and the fact that Weiner was deceitful about his electronic flirtations isn’t much of a guide to his integrity qua legislator, at least not relative to… his actual record as a legislator.

None of this is to say that Weiner’s behavior doesn’t deserve condemnation, just that I can’t see how—in the absence of a genuine nexus to his public powers and responsibilities—it’s the place of people outside Weiner’s immediate social circle to deliver it, and certainly not if the person with the strongest right to complain would just as soon resolve this one without our “help.”

Addendum: Tracy Clark-Flory’s over at Salon has somewhat related thoughts worth a read.

A Washington Post article this morning about openly gay military service inadvertently reveals the intellectual intolerance and closed-mindedness of the Left. The article also exposes the Left’s true agenda, which is to stamp out real diversity and to force everyone to submit to its “progressive” agenda. [...]
In practice, this means that the rights of cultural traditionalists and religious believers will be infringed upon and, ultimately, stamped out altogether. After all, as the Washington Post explains, everyone must be forced to “accept” the new orthodoxy. Everyone must submit to the Left’s superior Rousseauian will.

This is truly bizarre. Religious believers in the armed forces are also, of course, “forced” to “accept” serving alongside Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Jews, and a whole welter of other religious denominations. At the risk of dipping my toes into unfamiliar theological waters, it was my understanding that explicitly rejecting the Holy Spirit was a kind of paramount sin, and so presumably ought to be regarded by conservative believers as a more serious offense than mere open homosexuality. Yet I don’t hear anyone complaining that the rights of Christian soldiers are being trampled just by dint of their being required to serve along Zoroastrians, or that this is somehow tantamount to being compelled to endorse someone else’s religious beliefs. Probably in any given unit, there are lots of people who openly acknowledge many different types of conduct that a conservative Christian would regard as sinful. It’s only in the case of this particular sin that being forced to fight alongside the “sinner” counts as unconscionable oppression. It’s almost as though the opposition were grounded in something other than—and uglier than—pure adherence to religious convictions.

The Times may believe that, but other experts –and probably most Americans — would disagree. Besides, that’s not exactly the issue. The issue is whether there’s a connection between the homosexuality of the priests and the molestation of the boys.

First, no, serious experts, unlike scientifically defrocked frauds like Paul Cameron, do not disagree. Second, Oliver has obviously—somehow—failed to grasp that the priests who molested boys were almost certainly not “homosexual” in any sense that’s relevant to the argument of the piece, because in general “the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.” I’m not sure how he could have missed this with even trivial due diligence research, since it’s the overwhelming consensus among sexuality researchers, but let’s walk through it slowly, since some people seem to have enormous difficulty wrapping their heads around the point.

Suppose—just work with me for a second here—you are studying some men who compulsively have sex with goats. You might, out of scientific curiosity, want to discover whether there was any correlation between the sexual orientation of the men and their unusual predilection. The obviously wrong way to go about discovering this is to ask: “Well, were they mostly boy goats, or girl goats?” Because the whole goat thing is really best conceived as its own rather disturbed “orientation,” with no necessary connection to whatever preference one might have between humanoids.

So it is with pedophilia. If by “male homosexuality” we mean a general sexual attraction to other men, then pedophiles—including the abusive priests Oliver discusses—are not homosexual. Research shows that men who molest young boys overwhelmingly either have no sexual interest in adults, or are heterosexual in their adult orientation. So consistent is this finding that one group of researchers posited that “homosexuality and homosexual pedophilia may be mutually exclusive.” Evey now and again, a phony “study” purports to “discover” a link between homosexuality and pedophilia, and invariably these “studies” proceed by simply classifying male abusers of male children as “homosexual” without inquiring into any adult attraction. So when Oliver asks “Are most child molesters in the Catholic Church homosexuals?”—the correct answer, if you have the first notion what you’re talking about, is that probably few or none of them are.

Folks like Oliver, who do not have the first notion what they are talking about, invariably find this argument maddening: “Homosexual” means what they damn well say it means, and on that definition a man who molests a boy is “homosexual” as a matter of pure deductive logic, whatever those dumb old “scientists” say. One would be tempted to humor this sort of foot-stamping if it were a purely semantic question, but Oliver obviously thinks it has predictive value:

Isn’t this the key question: Are homosexual priests more likely to molest children than non-homosexual priests? If we don’t know, shouldn’t we find out? Because if they are, wouldn’t it make sense to pay special attention to the assignments given to homosexual priests.

But we do already know the answer to this question, and the answer is an unequivocal “no”—a point on which American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and the American Psychological Association agree. If by “homosexual” we mean “people who are known to be attracted to adult men,” then we know that they are not more likely, and indeed, quite possibly less likely to molest children. If we expand the term to cover “men who are known to be attracted to young boys”—then, obviously, those people should not be allowed within a country mile of a child unsupervised. But at this point presumably even the Church has figured that much out. Oliver’s question only makes sense if he means “homosexual” in the first sense. And fortunately, we don’t need to ask the question or “find out,” because all the research shows there’s essentially no overlap between “homosexuals” in that sense and abusers of young boys. So again, in the only sense of the term that makes the core argument of the piece intelligible, the abusive priests Oliver is talking about are almost certainly not “homosexual.” That is, they probably lack any adult same-sex attraction by which they might have been identified before their obsessions with children were discovered. Even if you want to insist on the broader sense of “homosexual,” the argument would obviously collapse if Oliver had been constrained to specify, in each case, whether he meant “men known to be attracted to boys” or “men known to be attracted to adult men” or both.

This is not, to put it mildly, terribly obscure or secret information. It is the sort of thing a minimally competent high school student doing a research paper would have discovered via a Google search. Even if Oliver wants to claim the scientists have somehow got it all wrong, there is no intellectually honest way to make the argument he wants to make without at least facing up to this finding explicitly.

So there are two possibilities. The first is that Oliver is miraculously innocent of this point, because he did not do even this minimal sort of research, and nobody at the Spectator saw fit to exercise a scintilla of editorial oversight before running the piece. The second possibility is that Oliver is aware of this scientific consensus that same-sex pedophiles typically lack any adult same-sex attraction, but that he and the Spectator are sufficiently contemptuous of both their readers’ intelligence and basic journalistic standards that it seemed safe to simply refuse to mention this fact—let alone make any substantive attempt to address it—lest it get in the way of some gay-bashing, Times-bashing red meat. I leave it to the reader to decide which alternative is more embarrassing.

Addendum: At a second look, it’s even worse that I’m making it out to be.  Oliver’s basis for concluding that one of the abusive priests in question “is homosexual” comes from a memo in which a superior suggests that he “could be allowed to teach religion ‘at a girls’ school.’”  Here, the kind of confusion Oliver engages in could well have put more children in danger. Because while it’s possible that the pedophile priest in question was only interested in molesting boys, it is also possible that he had simply had greater access to boys at that point. In that case, failure to understand the distinction between a male abuser of (thus far) male children and “a homosexual” could well have put more children at risk. How blinkered and morally dead inside do you need to be to read this grotesque suggestion that a known child rapist be placed in a position of authority over more children and react with outrage… at The New York Times?

Addendum II: I should note that if we’re talking about cases where the victims of abuse were teenagers, then the abusers might not be “true” pedophiles in the clinical sense. It is, of course, rightly frowned upon for adults to be attracted to 16-year-olds of either gender, but it is not pathological. Since the victim of the priest in question here was 11 years old, however, that’s not relevant to this case.

When a woman didn’t enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast, and ask for taxi money.

Now, especially in the context of an alleged rape by a family friend of many years, this is an incredibly dumb reason to discount the accusation.  In a country where rape is appallingly common—and commonly goes unreported—it’s also irresponsible for a prominent figure like Malema to cavalierly imply that any accuser who doesn’t fit his cartoonish preconception of how a victim behaves can be dismissed as a liar.  But I’m  disappointed to see a writer at Feministing calling for a victory celebration in the wake of a court ruling finding Malema guilty of discriminatory hate speech and slapping him with a $7,000 penalty.

Even in the context of South African law—which doesn’t appear to privilege speech quite so zealously as the U.S. system—the decision seems questionable, since the country’s hate speech law apparently requires that one intentionally seek to inflict harm on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.  And while everything I’ve read about the vilification of the accuser in this case is pretty horrifying, there are (unfortunately) cases like this that ultimately come down to who people find more credible: An accused who says the sex was consensual, and an accuser who says it was rape. This not only raises obstacles to victims seeking justice, but often opens them to all sorts of slanderous character attacks, which we rightly deplore. But it’s basically impossible to have any meaningful discussion of cases like these without talking about why one believes one side or the other.  Even when the reasons offered are dumb, it sounds like a phenomenal mistake to class such statements as deliberate attempts to inflict gender-based harm.

Feministing’s Lori Adelman calls the ruling “cause for celebration” because it sends a message to “rape apologists” that attempts to stigmatize victims who come forward “will not be tolerated without legal ramification.”  I think it sends the message that one ought to avoid any public discussion of controversies related to race or gender. If you cannot tell in advance what kind of speech will be deemed hateful and incur penalty, because you can do it inadvertently and the harm can be indirect, the only safe strategy is to give the whole area a wide berth. And I don’t know what reason there is to think a legal cudgel of that breadth couldn’t be used by those in power against critics. Is there any reason to feel a priori certainty that some supporter of Zuma (acquitted, recall) couldn’t find a pretext for a similar suit against some opponent who spoke out in solidarity with the accuser?  Or perhaps a political cartoonist who invoked the case? Recall, after all, that Zuma ended up filing a raft of defamation suits against several media outlets that covered the rape trial. Is there reason to think he wouldn’t have added a charge of hate speech if he’d thought of it?

If you want to create a climate in which South Africans finally feel free to speak more openly about rape cases, in other words, you probably shouldn’t be celebrating a decision that punishes someone speaking about a rape case.  And if you want to claim that you care at all about the principle of free speech as such, you probably shouldn’t be quite so eager to find some reason it doesn’t apply to people you revile.

But what’s really baffling is that it’s never quite made clear what the authors find problematic about the rather anodyne goal of promoting tolerance and civility between students. Given that actual kids in actual schools do bully and harass kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes, or who come from nontraditional families, what does the Times regard as an acceptable approach by the schools? They’re supposed to stand by in silence, for fear that they might “indoctrinate” someone with the radical communist view that it’s unacceptable to use “gay” and “faggot” as terms of abuse? Or perhaps they should just ban the word “gay” without explanation, as though it’s some kind of profanity, or an especially heinous thing to accuse someone of? It seems to me you’ve got to be awfully dense not to get that there’s also an implicit lesson when schools casually and routinely reference hetero relationships, while gay and lesbian couples—who, like, go to supermarkets and have kids in little league and stuff; students are going to notice they exist—are under some kind of omerta, never to be mentioned. Is the conservative position now that schools are supposed to remain indifferent to harassment in their halls, or to treat the families of certain students as a shameful secret?  Because that appears to be the alternative.

Thought Experiment:  If nearly naked men had been dancing in those columns, do you think the audience would have thought “hot men for the women!” or “how gay!”?   I think many, if not most, would have thought “how gay!”   A female gaze that validates women’s sexual subjectivity and the sexual objectification of men is simply less accessible for both women and men.   I think if men were dancing in the columns, an objectifying male gaze would still be at play, except this time the gaze would have been aimed at men.

Wade attributes this to the “primacy of the male gaze” and the presumption that the default perspective is male.  Which is probably no small part of it, but I think there’s some other stuff going on here as well.  First, there’s a widely held belief that men are much more responsive than women to visual sexual stimulus. Recent brain research suggests that this may, in fact, be a myth—but the idea is widespread enough that a marketer trying to use sex to sell in a visual medium may just be trying to maximize the effectiveness of their ad.

But I think part of what’s lurking here has to do with the way homophobia tends to be asymetrically focused on male homosexuality. The bogeyman for social conservatives seems to be gay men far more often than lesbians, and anxiety about being perceived as gay seems to be a much more pervasive straight male phenomenon.  This affects norms even in pretty gay-friendly circles: I’m not likely to tell a straight male friend his new suit or haircut looks “super hot” or greet him with a kiss on the cheek—even if I know both of us do those things with our gay male friends.   Which is to say, even if we’re both fine adopting the gay norm of interaction when it’s seen as the other person’s norm—when in Rome and so forth—there’s a residual anxiety about being the one introducing it. This is pervasive enough that it even shapes our private reactions: I’m also not that likely to see a Dior ad in a magazine and consciously form the thought “wow, he looks hot” even as a sentiment of simple aesthetic appreciation. Of course, if the ad successfully motivates me to think that maybe I would look good in a similar suit, I must at least implicitly be thinking something like that, but my tendency will not be to explicitly represent it to myself in those terms, something women generally seem more comfortable doing. And since our culture doesn’t seem to burden women with this particular bit of psychic baggage to the same extent, the straight-male image of “sexy” probably really is more “universal” in the sense that it’s more capable of being processed as “sexy” by both men and women, which again makes it more viable as a “generic” image for marketing purposes.

Based on a cursory scan, most of the people in the database seem to have committed truly vile acts—rape or sexual assault or child molestation. But there are a significant minority who—reading between the lines, using the rather vague wording of the offenses and the relevant ages of perpetrator and victim—basically seem to fall in the category of “young 20-something who had some kind of sexual contact, possibly consensual, with a 15-year-old.” Now, I have no problem with the state deterring and punishing that conduct, but I do wonder whether it’s wise to permanently and publicly group those people with violent rapists. A college student dating a high school girl may be displaying questionable judgment, but I’m not sure he’s therefore a danger to anyone else’s children 20 years later. Of course, the concerned parent can just pull up the rap sheet and see who’s guilty of what, but some states employ particularly confusing terminology: Florida’s legal system apparently classes age-inappropriate sexual contact as “lascivious battery.”

Many other cases are similarly unclear. I don’t know about you, but in my mind, the words “misdemeanor” and “sexual abuse” do not belong together—certainly not in a case involving a man in his 50s and a victim of 13. Yet there they are juxtaposed on my neighbor’s rap sheet. What exactly does that mean? Was that a conviction at trial or a plea? How dangerous should a concerned parent consider this guy?

That sort of uncertainty highlights a point legal scholar Jeff Rosen likes to make: Loss of privacy tends to cascade, because when one piece of information is exposed, it may require further disclosures to put it into context. In the case of sex offenders, of course, the privacy interests of the victims will often limit the amount of detail it’s advisable to put online, since a description of circumstances may well be enough to identify the victim to people who know the offender.

That aside, I’d be fascinated to see whether putting this information online actually has any other measurable effects. When registries are easily searchable, to neighborhoods with higher concentrations of sex offenders see relative declines in propety values? Lower rates of school registration? Does that accellerate such clustering by reducing the number of landords willing to rent to registered offenders? If we’ve got any social science grad students reading, this sounds like an easy road to a potential blockbuster paper.