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Actually, I got things mixed up with another of their exploits, and we're talking about the same case - Louis Conradt, the Texas prosecutor. The pretend girl was, in fact, a pretend boy. The facts are pretty much the same.

And here's where we run into my biggest problem with "To Catch a Predator:" it exploits real concerns to unhelpful ends. If a freaking prosecutor was, in fact, hanging around online trying to sexy-chat minors, that's an extremely serious problem beyond the already serious problem of adults trying to interfere in the development of their sexually-mature-but-otherwise-not fellow citizens. That's the kind of problem that, once exposed, undoes unrelated and solid court cases already made, maybe, and puts real villains out on the streets again. The full power of law enforcement should be applied there, for all kinds of reasons beyond the initial concern for minor safety and thwarting criminally bad behavior.

But that's not what happened. Instead, this guy was caught accidentally in a quasi-legal constitutional runaround by law enforcement in conjunction with a self-appointed and aggrandizing vigilante group for purposes of entertainment.

Because that's all "To Catch a Predator" is, really, some of the sickest kind of popular entertainment our increasingly fearful nation indulges in, these days. It demonstrably helps no one: it's not, as though, any of these men were intercepted in the process of actually committing a crime involving a minor. Their intent is all that matters, and we can argue all day whether or not criminalizing intent helps anything or not, but that's well beside the point: no one has been rescued from harm, in any sense, and no actual harm has been balanced by justice. Call me crazy, but it's my understanding that law enforcement is supposed to prevent harm when they can and investigate it when it has happened, in service of prosecution, not redirect their time and energy into goading and cajoling those who might do harm into actively expressing intent to do so.

As I said, I understand that this is a real problem, and it has been so for as long as I've been alive, anyway. I knew girls when I was younger who succumbed to the attention of the what-the-hell's-wrong-with-them? older guys who've been buzzing around high schools since high school was invented, I have to imagine. This was overwhelmingly not a positive thing for them, in my observation. I knew a guy at my last job who had to step in and call the cops up in New England because his fourteen-year-old daughter had "fallen in love" with a twenty-two-year-old guy up there and he was trying to talk her into sneaking up there to see him. So, yeah really, I know that shit happens.

But here's what I also know about that guy: he's not a very good husband or father. His wife is mentally ill, and has been for several years, and rather than giving her the support she needs or being honest about his inability to do so in any manner, he's put his attention and energy into a series of affairs with younger women at work. He's in the middle of one, now, with someone close to me. (I have not been able, in the limited sense you can even try to do so, to talk any fucking sense into her about this. Nobody has. She's an adult, though, and she'll have to hit that hard wall on her own. We tried.) His now-teenage children are largely neglected, left to the care of a mad woman while he "stays late at work" and "goes to school."

In other words, the real wonder here is that any of this was even caught in time, and that his daughter didn't end up on Nancy Grace's show for weeks on end.

I have a couple of teenagers, myself, and my daughter is about to start high school, so this is a real concern to my ex and me, these days. To that end, we've imposed restrictions on both our kids' time spent online over the years that we've relaxed as they've gotten older, but I'm not that relaxed. I do know how to ferret out shit about people online they'd like to hide, and I do get emails from my kids, cc'd to their friends on occasion, and periodically, I use the addresses and screen names to sweep the predictable spaces in which either could potentially put themselves in harm's way. I can't do a lot, practically, from across the country, but that I can do, and then I send my ex an email saying "It's all good."

And it always is all good, and I expected it to be, because way beyond imposing limits and checking up on the kids to make sure they aren't broken, we have a good handle on how our kids are developing and what they're doing at any given point, because we've made an effort to do so since they were born. Again, I'm divorced, I live in another state, and it's my ex-wife who has to do the day-to-day monitoring and maintenance, alone, and she does that, consistently. I have to rely on her reports and step in when I can and it's advisable - as when my son was getting into fights at school, so I suggested he take a year off, take classes online, and come live with me and Evonne. And he did, and it worked. He hasn't been in a fight since he returned to school, and he's starting college part-time this fall at the same time he starts junior year. Not to toot our own horns, since all of this just seems like Bonehead Parenting 101 to me, but yay us, I guess.

My children are growing into their own full personhood, now, and increasingly beyond our efforts as parents. In both our estimation, though, our efforts from the beginning have paid off. We have kids who make pretty good choices, most of the time. We have kids we can trust. Anything can happen, I suppose, but I never expect, when I go digging, to find a MySpace page with my daughter on it getting drunk and making out with her friends and flashing her boobs, for instance. That's just not the young woman we raised, or whom we know and talk to all the time.

And really, that's what people can do to prevent this sort of thing: pay attention to their kids, for real, not some bullshit commercial hype machine dedicated to exploiting their worst fears. Far from not helping, in that sense, I have to think, "To Catch a Predator" may actually hurt. If terrified reaction, after all, so defines your approach to child-rearing, rather than caring action, I have to think you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, sorry for the length. This is, as I said, a subject I have good reason to give a lot of thought to, these days.

So...forgive him?

As an atheist, I don't appreciate your appeal to unreason. Since, you know, the finer things in life - like forgiveness - are the sole province of religion. It's what everybody thinks of first, after all, when they think of religion: blind, stinking, filthy compassion and humility.

Ugh, I feel dirty just typing those words.

No, I got it. I was attempting to be funny back. Apparently, I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

That article you linked to was hysterical, BTW.

Oh, sorry. I've been having bouts of serious insomnia, lately, and I was up all night and am a little loopy, right now.