From:
You know the golden rule, don’t you boy? Those who have the gold make the rules!
<blockquote> “Christian Adamek, from Huntsville, Alabama, hanged himself on October 2, a week after he was arrested for running naked across the Sparkman High football field during a game. The teenager died two days later from his injuries and on Wednesday, friends and family gathered at a memorial service as they struggled to comprehend the beloved student’s death. A video of Adamek streaking during a game against a rival team was posted on YouTube hours after the event and students took to Twitter to call him a ‘legend.’ ‘Sparkman’s new slogan is gonna be “Welcome to Sparkman High School, Home of Christian Adamek,”‘ one student wrote. But school staff did not treat the situation so lightly. Sparkman High Principal Michael Campbell told WHNT a day before the suicide attempt that the teen could face major repercussions because of his actions. ‘There’s the legal complications,’ Campbell said. ‘Public lewdness and court consequences outside of school with the legal system, as well as the school consequences that the school system has set up.’ In Alabama, indecent exposure is linked to the state’s sex offender laws, meaning that he could have found himself on the sex offenders register due to the streaking. Campbell added that that the incident was not just a prank and needed to be treated seriously. Sparkman High administrators even recommended that Adamek face a hearing in the Madison County court system to determine if formal charges would be filed, WHNT reported. Adamek had also been disciplined by the school district but the details had not been made public.
The day before the suicide attempt, the principal had confirmed that Adamek was not at school and the teenager’s sister suggested on Twitter that Adamek faced expulsion, AL.com reported.
Campbell declined to comment on Adamek’s death but the Madison County school district issued a statement saying it had ‘received word that a Sparkman High School student has passed away.’Our prayers and thoughts are with the family during this time of bereavement,’ the statement read. The messages on Twitter have now turned from congratulatory to somber. ’Praying for the Adamek family. Christian was so funny and nice. He will be missed by so many,’ one girl wrote.
‘He was one that brightened the room when he walked in. That’s what I’ll always remember about Christian.’” —-”
Boy, 15, kills himself after ‘facing expulsion and being put on sex offender registry’ for streaking prank at high school football game” by Lydia Warren, The Daily Mail
</blockquote> The tragic death of Christian Adamek is a complete moral failure of the social and legal mores surrounding this child and in many ways, all of us. This is a situation that should deeply move every
naturist and
any sane thinking person. This horrible event raises multiple questions of great concern for our society. How about in this blog we just start with some basic constitutional principles – we can move on to more subtle issues in subsequent blogs.
It seems that somewhere in the history of our nation and its jurisprudence there have been included some very important and fundamental concepts such as; “punishment befitting a crime,” and protection of our citizenry from “cruel and unusual punishment.” In what universe could threatening and /or actually putting a streaking child prankster on a sex offender registry, a legal action that may literally destroy a person’s life, be considered in any way as “punishment befitting the crime”? In fact,
Alabama state law itself classifies “indecent exposure” only as a misdemeanor. How do we get from a misdemeanor to threats of a sex offender registry? Shouldn’t one have to commit more than a “misdemeanor” to become a sex offender? Is this not pushing up against cruel and unusual punishment? Do we limit our understanding of “cruel and unusual” to mere physical torture? Does anyone remember the great novel -
The Scarlet Letter - where the life of the protagonist is destroyed by social stigmatization for a relatively minor (by today’s standards) moral failure? Is it not just as cruel and unusual to slowly destroy an innocent person’s life, as in this case, through a “scarlet letter” – a sex registry – as it is to physically torture them?
The concept of
streaking is well known, long standing and has been engaged in as a matter of pure ‘prankishness’ in all manner of different settings for decades both here in the United States and abroad. Have these law enforcement Neanderthals in Alabama somehow missed out on the past 30 or 40 years of American and International history? Where, aside from perhaps Alabama, has there ever been a valid legal precedent set which in any way identifies streaking solely as a sex crime in any real ontological sense? Perhaps it may be misconstrued as such by rank amateurs in law enforcement – but certainly not in terms of actual criminal science. There are those, like these fanatics involved law enforcement in Alabama, who may debate the relative level of “offense” that streaking may arouse, just like there are those prudes out there who debate the level of offense of a mother innocently nursing her child on a park bench. But to any sane person neither streaking, nor publicly breastfeeding a baby, is in any way a sexual act. Only a complete imbecile would think differently. It is absurd enough that adults can become sex offenders merely by being naked in public. But a
15 year old kid? For an age-old prank? Such a charge is horribly unjust. Furthermore, those who cannot morally distinguish between true sex crime, like rape, or other forms of real sexual assault, and something as nonsexual as streaking across a football field in front of thousands of people do not qualify to be involved in any form of law enforcement. Period.
What then should we make of a school system, and local law enforcement who threatens a child with sex offender registry for streaking? We begin by noting bluntly that these decision makers are morally blind fanatics, ‘jack-boot’ authoritarians consumed with self importance, lacking common sense, and of cruel intent. They are sick schoolyard bullies. Their actions toward this child are self serving and are in no way in the interests of loving, restorative discipline or social order. Out of pure hubris they grossly and incompetently swat flies with sludge hammers, and the result is that an emotionally immature youth is now dead – a youth who deserved guidance, not bullying threats. Parents, family, and community stand in utter shock and grief because law enforcement bullies were not capable of making even the simplest of moral distinctions. How sad for this child, for his family and for all of us. There should be resignations demanded and flags at half mast across this nation.
But, I digress – have I somehow forgotten – we the people don’t matter to these authoritarian creeps, and neither did Christian Adamek.Young Naturists & Nudists America