Defending the 700,000 Most Despised People in America: The Mothers' Rebellion

8-14-2010 National:

JoAnn Wypijewski Interviews RSOL Moms for CounterPunch

Early this summer an organization representing arguably the most despised people in America, and calling itself obliquely RSOL, for Reform Sex Offender Laws, met in Washington D.C. to allow people from across the country to talk strategy, lobby Congress and simply step from the heavy shadow of fear and shame.

From the looks on their face, it seems never to have occurred to Congressional aides that the 700,000-plus people on America’s sex offender registries might have loved ones, or might themselves finally have grown sick of keeping quiet. The aides surely were as clueless as I had been that in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico some of these people have been stopping ever more punitive legislation or revising existing law in the direction of sanity, and that the wives and, mostly, mothers of people on the registry had discovered the radical essence of simply speaking up.

I talked to three women. Only one, Mary Duval, who started a group called SOSEN in Oklahoma and co-hosts a weekly radio talk show, wanted to be identified by her full name. For the remainder of this article: