I’m writing in regard to a July 11 article by Victoria Wallack, titled “Panel to study sex registry changes”, as well as an editorial by David Harry, editor of the Lakes Region Weekly paper titled, “Changes to sex offender registry overdue.”

According to Wallack, Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Cumberland, chairman of the committee, is at work with the Legislators Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. She said the group will tackle how sex offenders are categorized in Maine, so the risk from the convicted offender is more apparent. It also ranks a person’s risk to offend.

Diamond said, “I think we need to be more concise and create a registry where it’s clear what people have done, so everyone won’t have to be fearful of everybody whose name is on the there.”

Harry comments on this by saying this would give the least severe offenders a break by not publishing their names, thus fixing it so that someone who didn’t like rapists wouldn’t mistakenly kill them instead of a “more severe offender” who was registered.

Cited as examples were William Elliot murdered by Stephen A. Marshall whose name was registered for raping an under aged girl and also for another one of his victims, Joseph Gray, convicted of sexual assault on a child.

However, it seems to me that this is being overly concerned about the rapists instead of the victims and their families. It is generally considered a truism that rapists have a vicious habit of re-offending. After all that’s what the registry program is all about. So I wonder if some “least offender” wouldn’t be tempted to take full advantage of their “cloaked” whereabouts?

Granted, Diamond and the Legislature are trying to do something about this situation of life and death for a potential victim but meanwhile they are totally ignoring the cause of it all – pornography!

Can I prove that? You bet your bottom dollar I can! I have the advantage of having been born in 1918, so I’ve been able to watch the gradual influx of sin into our American culture.

Oh (gasp), there I go, using that awful word – sin. I figure I might as well – as long as I can. What? You think that’s pretty far fetched? Not really – in Canada, if one uses the word homosexual in a negative manner, especially from the pulpit, arrest is imminent.

Only a few years ago the Ten Commandments and the word God were welcome in our schools. Now the only way schools will tolerate it is when used as a swear word. And as for the Ten Commandments, they have been taken from the walls.

I understand that one of the sitting judges at the hearing argued that young students might have their poor little psyches horribly damaged by all those “thou shalt nots!” So much for liberal, ungodly, activist judges!

But I digress. Being 90 years old has its advantages. One actually has a chance to have had a living part in recent history. I saw this country go from one nation under God to one nation over God.

Atheists and human secularists have been hard at work trying to convince the public that religion is to blame for all the evil that exists in today’s society and argue that if man could have total freedom, with God eliminated, utopia would soon be realized.

But here we see that what God’s word says is true – that good would be called evil, and evil good. For it is as plain as the nose on our faces that the profane have had their chance these last 50 years and have in many instances brought us hell on earth!

I can remember when doors were left unlocked, women felt safe on the streets at night, incidents of rape in the paper might be seen a couple times a year, while today it’s unlikely to be able to pick up a paper without reading about some poor woman, young girl, or child being brutally raped, followed many times by a horrible death and secret burial as a cover up ploy.

And I hesitate to say it, but unless pornography is made illegal, as it was half a century ago, as time goes on someone reading this article has a chance of it happening to them, or someone they love.

Talk about terrorists! Some 4,000 of our people killed in the Tall Towers and we go to war. How many victims have lost their lives to rape in our nation during the last 40 years, and “We The People” do nothing about it!

Someone once commented: My philosophy is against laws that tread on the toes of personal freedoms. But never mind my philosophy, or anyone else’s, especially when it comes to putting an end to the terror and physical torture of brutal rape and murder!

Phil Kennard

Windham