News Slant	News Slant Archive

Under legislation pending in Congress and embraced in 2008 Republican platform, the US could claim the right to jail foreign visitors who have ever had sex anywhere any time that the US now considers illegal — even if the acts were acceptable where and when they occurred.

There's an out: if you notify the jurisdiction to which you plan to travel 21 days in advance of your visit to the US, you won't be in violation — but you'll also almost certainly be barred from entering the land of the free. That's because local US authorities notified that a sexual miscreant plans to visit "shall promptly inform the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General" — who, in turn, can and do block visitors at the border for "moral turpitude."

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All these provisions are part of the "International Megan's Law of 2008," legislation introduced in April and now sitting in committee in the House.

It's not hard to be a sex criminal in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Federal sex law is increasingly wide-reaching. An 18-year-old who crosses from Manhattan to Hoboken for a date with a 16 year old — or merely just buys the token — is a federal sex criminal. So is a 17-year-old who uses his cellphone camera to take the measure of his manhood.

The law would cover consensual teen sex legal wherever it happened — such as between a 16-year-old and someone 18 that in many countries isn't a problem. In order to help prevent travel by people who've had — by US officials' eyes — illegal sex, the proposed law also encourages the US to fund other governments and NGOs to create sex offender registries in the large majority of countries that don't have them.