Louisiana or 1950s Mental Hospital? It's Your Call.

Yesterday, the Louisiana State Senate voted 32-3 to send a bill to the State House that would make castration an acceptable and sometimes mandatory punishment for sex offenders in the state. [Fox News] For second-time offenders, castration would be mandatory, provided that a "medical expert" decided castration would be effective. Chemical castration, via medroxyprogesterone acetate, would be the default method, but offenders would be able to choose physical castration instead.

Take a moment. I'll wait for you to catch up.

Let's roam into the hypothetical. Medrozyprogesterone acetate is a progestin that, when used as a treatment in males, reduces sex drive. Makes sense. Yes, introducing progesterones in a testosterone-filled environment will reduce sex drive. That seems like a common sense statement, and unfortunately I cannot veryify it because there are no studies on the effects of medrozyprogesterone acetate in healthy men. Every study I found was about sperm count in men having recently received vasectomies. Moving on. That's not the ridiculous part.

The ridiculous part is the assumption that too much sex drive is the underlying problem. Grown men do not rape children because they have overactive libidos. Rape, whether of grown women or of children, is an action driven by anger and rooted in violence.

Non-consentual sex is a physical manifestation of anger, violence is the coping mechanism, and mental illness is what we should be addressing. How often sex offenders feel the urge to get laid is not what we need to be talking about.