Precious Are They

When will it end? As I sit here writing this, a child will go missing in the United States. Before I am done, 30 children will have disappeared from the streets of America. These children may just be walking home from school, may be playing at the park with friends, may be angry at their parents and decide to walk up the street to cool off. Whatever the reason, most of them will never be seen or heard from again. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a child goes missing in the United States every 40 seconds. That means that over 2,100 children become missing every single day! This is a sobering statistic. I share this with you to bring attention to a serious problem within our society. The problem is child sexual predators.

Last week, the news alerted us to the disappearance of two little girls, one 7 year old, Somer Thompson, in Florida and a 9 year old, Elizabeth Olten, in Missouri. Hundreds of law enforcement officials and volunteers turned out to search for these two precious little girls and thousands more prayed for their safe return all week. But, on Thursday and Friday the horrific tragedies came to a close as the bodies of both girls were found. One was found in a landfill 50 miles from her home and another in the woods near her home. This is tragic! Both of these little girls' lives were cut short by vicious murderers. A 15 year old boy has been charged with the murder of Elizabeth, but so far no suspects have been found in Somer's murder. Although the authorities have declined to say so, it is probably a safe assumption that both of these children suffered unimaginably and their murderers were sexually motivated. I do not write this to offend anyone, only to show the depravity of these murders. My point is simply this: how many more helpless, beautiful little girls are going to disappear from our streets before we say enough is enough?

Every single time one of these murders happens, the person charged and convicted is a convicted sexual offender out on parole. Clearly, the system is broken. These monsters cannot be rehabilitated, they cannot be reintroduced into society with the hope that they will not offend again. These people are sick, they are unable to assimilate into normal life and they CANNOT and MUST NOT be trusted. All one has to do to realize the scope of this problem is google "sexual offenders in your area" and use the Family Watchdog site. I am sad to report that I have 1161 offenders in my area. Any one of these people could easily decide to offend again and my children would be in jeopardy. The solution to this problem is quite simple: lock sexual offenders up for life. Build more prisons if you have to, but keep them away from the citizenry. I would be willing to pay higher taxes if I knew that my money was helping to pay to keep violent sexual predators of both children and women behind bars so that they could never harm an innocent person again. Wouldn't you?

I know that the U.S. Constitution says that you are innocent until proven guilty, but when DNA evidence proves that a crime was committed by a particular person and that crime was violent, sexual and murderous, I believe that our Founding Fathers would have allowed for execution of the criminal, not just imprisonment. We have far too many liberal judges that believe that everyone deserves a second chance and that anyone can be cured with some psychological assistance. This is simply not true. Listen to the last words of murderers on death row. Quite often they are neither repentant nor remorseful for their heinous acts. It is the same with sexual predators - they simply don't see what they are doing as wrong.

There must be a way to stop this madness and protect our children from these monsters. The most popular liberal mantra is always "...for the children." But, they are the very people responsible for releasing these people into the wild to kidnap, assault, murder children and toss them away like garbage again. Liberals are so fond of asking conservatives why we are not compassionate, how we can be against abortion or a "woman's right to choose", how we can be against gay marriage and pro-death penalty because they say these people are discriminated against and need protection? I can think of no other group of people more in need of our protection than innocent children. Children whose lives are filled with promise and hope and love and dreams. Children who just want to come home at the end of the day and sit in Mom or Dad's lap and tell them what they learned at school or what new friend they made that day or how much they liked the macaroni and cheese Mom made for dinner. These children need and deserve our protection - they deserve to know that they can walk from their next door neighbor's house and be safe - that they will arrive home and be tucked in bed for a peaceful night's sleep. If liberals want to do it "for the children", maybe they should focus less on providing women with a health care plan that will pay for abortions and more on legislation that will permanently imprison those people who are determined to harm the most innocent and precious amongst us - our children.