Till death do us part....

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`Commentary` - Jan 21, 2007 - `Printable Version`
- Till death do us part....
by Mark Faulk

    A couple of items from the “I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or just throw up” department, to be filed in the “truth is stranger than fiction” department:

    An article in the Sunday Oklahoman today begins with this:

    Like many men on MySpace, Yancy Douglas is looking for a loving, generous woman.
“I hope to find a woman with whom I can build a ‘solid’ foundation of unconditional friendship with!” Douglas wrote in his MySpace profile. “All I ask for is a chance!!!”

    It’s the type of profile that millions of others have on MySpace, with pictures, a “details” section that tells potential friends that Yancy is single, a Scorpio, and says “I don’t want kids.” The first thing that sets this profile apart is Yancy’s “About me” section, which details his life as…are you ready for this?…a prisoner on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. His groups, which are the MySpace equivalent of internet message boards, include “Inmate Love,” “Locked up-Put yo people on,” and “Lovers in Prison.”

    It turns out that Yancy and possibly thousands of others like him, have MySpace accounts, which is owned by Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch, who incidentally has a MySpace account opened in his name by a “fan,” who lists Murdoch’s interests as “Global domination and the conjunction of church and state, Censorship of private or liberal interest groups, Censorship of MySpace pages that do not agree with my views.”

    Good times.

    According to the Oklahoman article, MySpace didn’t respond to a request for comment, which is nothing new, since, according to a crime victims’ advocate in Houston who discovered that at least 40 death row inmates in Texas were on MySpace, they have not responded to several letters and requests to have those inmates removed from MySpace.

    In defense of the Oklahoma Penitentiary, they said that the prisoners don’t have access to the internet, so either friends or family set up the accounts for them, and pass messages on to the prisoners or ask those on the list to write letters to them.

    As my wife put it when I told her about prisoners looking for long-term relationships on MySpace, “yeah, till death do us part.”

    Granted, it would be difficult for MySpace officials to keep track of the over 100 million accounts on their site, but this shows more than ever why the system needs to be set up to at the very least separate people who are underage and/or just using MySpace to connect with family and friends from those who obviously shouldn’t be interacting with “the rest of society,” including child predators, people who are there for sexual reasons, and yes…death row inmates. And considering the accusations by MySpace users that they will delete accounts based on political viewpoints, they should at the every least respond to requests to remove convicted murderers from a site frequented by tens of millions of teenagers.

    In another bit of bizzaro-world news this week, a 29 year-old convicted sex offender from Oklahoma tried to enroll in school as a sixth-grader after posing as a twelve year-old. Luckily, school officials thought he looked a mature old for a twelve year-old, called police, and the manchild was arrested.

    But wait, that’s not the crazy part...well, it is crazy, but it gets even crazier. The sex offender had been living with two men, ages 61 and 43, who had met the “boy” on the internet, traded photographs with him, and eventually moved him in with them. When confronted with the news that their boy toy was really a grown man, the two men expressed shock and outrage that he had lied to them.

    Why? Not because they thought they were raising a young child, but because they thought they were having sex with a preteen, and felt deceived that they were actually doing it with a *shudder* grown man.

    According to another man who lived in the house, "They were shocked and angry. They were more upset that he was a 29 year-old and not what they believed he was. Until that point they thought they were in a sexual relationship with a 12 year-old."

    I don’t even know how to respond to that one. I guess I’ll end with a quote that has become almost a mantra for The Faulking Truth, from the movie Little Big Man:

    “The world was too ridiculous to bother to live in.”

    And that, as per usual, is the Faulking Truth.

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Commentary - Jan 21, 2007 - Printable Version- Till death do us part.... by Mark Faulk

`Commentary` - Jan 21, 2007 - `Printable Version`
- Till death do us part....
by Mark Faulk