Park Life

I thought it was a joke, when I first heard. But no, there it was in print, right there in the Daily Regress. The good men (and women) in blue had had themselves a little old sex sting down at Ivy Creek. And a good thing, too; this sinful world is positively crawling with homosexuals, out to convert your children.

Perhaps I'd grown complacent in this day of slightly expanding tolerance. I simply was not expecting that sort of thing to happen -- the enforcement of those old sodomy statutes, I mean. Granted, sex in public isn't pretty, at least not to most of us, but that isn't what the police were after, exactly; it was the unnaturalness of the act, in that Natural Area. If you've ever been to Virginia Beach after dark, it's apparent that preventing simple public displays of amorousness is not a priority in the Old Dominion. Boys who do with boys are another matter.

I could go on for pages about the basic injustice of the sting, about the specific targeting of homosexual behavior, about the inequality inherent in the laws themselves and the enforcement thereof (by the way, all old statutes aren't enforced -- Norfolk still has one on the books that says a woman caught on the street without a corset can be arrested). But the nastiness of the sordid affair deepens.

The bulk of the original article in the Regress consisted of the names (first, middle, last, to avoid confusion) and ages of the perpetrators. While it is standard practice to name criminals in the newspaper, was it necessary to splash these names across the front page when the "crime" is literally victimless? What sort of justice is served in a case like this? One may argue the finer points of journalism until U-Hall falls, but a revelation like this is the kind of thing people lose jobs over, the kind of thing people have to change neighborhoods over. The kind of thing people commit suicide over.

A little bit of responsibility would have been nice, both on the part of the police conducting the sting and the newspaper reports about it. Although ostensibly nobody wants his or her children witnessing lewd acts of any sort (though how many parents allow their eight-year-olds access to MTV?), was a police sting the best remedy for this problem? Couldn't the issue have been handled with, at the most extreme, a few misdemeanor charges? How is a prison sentence going to make anyone less homosexual?

This whole thing smacks of witch hunt. It seems to me that the good men and women of the force could probably find some greater menace to society -- say, the guy who goes blasting down JPA at mach 2 in an effort to compensate for various, um, shortcomings. While extreme PDA is hardly a welcome sight, perhaps we should consider the underlying motivations, not to mention the implications, of a sting such as this one. I guess nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

-- JLP