Packingham and censorship of sex offenders

Let's talk about Packingham v. North Carolina. May states constitutionally ban convicted sex offenders from using social media? Some points that came up:

• Social media is an important part of modern life. The President uses Twitter to convey breaking news--this law would ban sex offenders from reading the President's Twitter feed. Isn't that excluding sex offenders from fully participating in our polity as informed citizens? Who's going to tell Packingham about the latest dead celebrity?
• On the other hand, there's a lot of precedent for denying people rights after they have been duly convicted of crimes. Going to prison means losing many rights. Not only that, after release you may face indefinite or lifetime loss of certain rights, like the right to vote or right to bear arms. You can lose the latter after only a misdemeanor conviction or even a restraining order! So if we don't sympathize with the guy who slaps his girlfriend and permanently loses his Second Amendment rights, why should we sympathize with the sex offender who loses access to Facebook?
• It's legally irrelevant, but since I brought up sympathy, let's have a moment of sympathy for the "sex offender" in this case, who was put on the registry after having sex with a 13-year-old when he was 21, fifteen years ago. A bad decision, but not bad enough to justify being on a sex offender registry.
• A big reason why Packingham won (spoiler) was the overbreadth of the law. It banned "gaining access to" social-networking sites that allow minors, no matter what you do on those sites, even if you have zero contact with minors, and even if you never post any comment. (Packingham got in trouble after a Facebook post in which he attributed getting out of a couple of traffic tickets to being specially favored by Jesus. I'm no theologian, but I would think once you're a registered sex offender you'd give up on the idea of being favored by God.)
• The law also categorized any site as a "social-networking site" if it allows users to comment and does not ban under-18 users. So not just what you or I would think of as social-networking sites, but most news sites, blogs, job sites, and many commercial sites like Amazon that allow user reviews.
• So a law meant to prevent sex predators from seducing children online ends up banning people from buying shoes on Zappos, looking for apartments on Craigslist, or reading WashingtonPost.com. If the person who wrote the law had drafted more cautiously, this law would have survived as a narrowly tailored "don't contact strange kids online" rule. Why don't people hire me to write these laws? As it is, the law was struck down as an unconstitutional restriction on speech.  

A story of Marriage

A man lost his job for watching pornography on his work computer. He explained that he is struggling to overcome a “porn addiction.” He has been married to his fat, deaf wife for about twenty years. They don’t have a conventional relationship, he said. They are “not intimate in any way.” She’s way too good for him. They are in counseling to help him overcome the “addiction.” He has no friends. But he has grown closer to his church group. Is this what marriage is like?

"Glamour" magazine

We all know Glamour as the magazine which led Americans to start misspelling “glamor.” But did you know it also teaches many terrible life lessons?

To the best of my recollection, all of these wonderful quotes were in the same magazine:

“Engagement eyeliner” worked for me!

(“Carrie’s” boyfriend complimented her electric blue eyeliner. Less than 24 hours later, he proposed. Glamour helpfully provides the brand name, but I will not. It sounds dangerous.)

Reading comprehension hint: when you see the word “hardwired”, know that whatever you are reading is probably bullshit.

Like most women, I’m hardwired to try to keep everybody who counts on me at the office and at home happy. There are weeks, not just days, when I feel like I’m cheating on him—with my work.

(Real women never displease others. Also, men need constant supervision. Whatever will he do if you go out and he doesn’t get sex for a whole eight hours? Probably stick forks into the electric outlets and pee on the floor.)

A dumb celebrity hopes her daughter will never develop sexual desire:

Jamie Lynn Spears says: “It’d be dumb to sit here and say that [my daughter] isn’t going to like a boy one day and she isn’t going to have a boyfriend. I’ll just have to handle that the best way that I can. Both her daddy and me will caution her about having sex, and I would hope that she would not want to do that at all, but I have to make sure that I’m realistic too.”

A woman who is boring in bed feels insecure about it:

Maybe everybody is kinkier than you are. So what? Having standard-issue sex in private is my fantasy, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

(Kinky sex is something other people do. Not Glamour readers, who are too busy with magic eyeliner and keeping everybody happy.)

Another dumb celebrity (Amanda Seyfried) says she doesn’t want to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex, and also women never want to have sex:

I’m terrified of being promiscuous. I don’t like the feeling you get when it’s not something that you truly want to do, and I hate the emotional abuse you give yourself afterward.

I will spare you Glamour’s advice on yeast infections, but it is also bad.

Birth control

This article on the politics of abortion is pretty okay, but the interesting part is the statistics:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.

(And those women who said they did use birth control were probably often talking about nothing but a condom!)

I think we need to, as far as we can, dissociate birth control from sex. As it is, people think of the decision to go on birth control as a preparation for sex; which makes young women hesitant about starting birth control, or about admitting it. (That's probably why so many young women say they're on the pill for medical reasons.) Now, the average age of first sexual intercourse in the U.S. is sixteen. Not a few girls do it at 12 or 13. Every woman should go on birth control by the age of 14 at the latest. As a precautionary measure. I would advise a public relations campaign aimed at parents. Parents don't like to admit their daughters will have sex--well, frame it as a medical issue, as was done more or less successfully with the HPV vaccine. That way, the ones who want to have sex will do it without being so neurotic about it and without getting pregnant, and the ones who don't won't be harmed.