No place to call home
By Mark Bliss….
Army veteran Paul King struggles to find a place to call home.
Shackled with poor health and a sexual-abuse conviction, King has seen his life deteriorate.
Nearly blind and with failing kidneys, the 45-year-old King, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, has been in and out of hospitals over the past eight months.
He lives in Peaceful Pines residential-care facility in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. The small facility can house 20 residents.
“I feel like I have been left here to die,” he said during a visit with his sister, Carol Christopher of Cape Girardeau.
Read the rest of the story, including the author’s interview with RSOL, in the Southeast Missourian.
Paul King, you are in my thoughts and prayers. Thank you for serving the very same country that has turned its back on you. In addition to the IML suit going on in California, I wish a class action lawsuit could be filed by everyone who has been turned away for federal assistance be it from Veterans Commissions, homeless shelters that take federal money or any other group or organization that discriminates against us. We’ve seen this before. Homeless shelters wouldn’t take HIV patients or demanded that they be tested. Transgender people have been turned away. It’s amazing how people’s childhood fears of a bogeyman easily become displaced onto marginalized people and THEY are the one’s that pay the cost for their ignorance. Sometimes the bogeyman lives inside of people like Denny Hastert and get projected onto the rest of us as a way for them to get their demons at bay. Stories like this one literally keep me up at night, they make me so angry. It could be me. It could be any one of us.
I am not Christian. I’m Jewish, in fact. But I’m curious if Jesus would be proud of this? Do “Christians” remember that Jesus sided with the outcasts? Healed the lepers. Forgave a prostitute? Our opponents would quote Matthew 18:6 but my response would be in total agreement. Who the hell condones child abuse? No one, certainly not us. When a recent article is able to get away with falsely aligning WAR growing as a result of murders of children and the false notion that it supports child abuse, it’s dishonesty becomes transparent. Such inaccurate and blatant lies allow people to actually believe that individuals like us are evil. This is wrong and THIS is what allows people like Paul King and many of us to be treated by the government in a subhuman way.
Furthermore, if one TRULY believes in Matthew 18:6, I guess a lot of the lawmakers are going to be in trouble since these laws have demonstrably harmed the children of RSO’S.
Most of those who call themselves Christians still live in the Old Testament of “Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a tooth” when it comes to people who have been labeled as registered sex offenders. Suffice to say that they believe, thanks to the lack of fact based information and the dishonest mass media, that all sex offenders are child rapists.
Is there any way we can take up a special donation and send it his way? Or at least a few letters with some encouraging words?
I will be sending some of these comments to the newspaper journalist who wrote the story to share with Mr. King. I think letters here would be super, or email them directly to communications@nationalrsol.org and they will then be sent to him. If you do that, put “for Paul King” as the subject line.
No place to call home?! Outrageous! My husband was ordered to leave his family home once bullied into their nasty plea in order to comply with residency restrictions. His disabled kids are without father now, waking up at night, in tears, asking where he is and why he is not coming to them! I am disabled and we have limited funds… My kids have special needs. Their father cannot be with them for the sake of this humiliating registry! He is unable to find housing! He is about become homeless and loose the only source of income his family depends on! He also has diabetes and other health issues. We (my kids and I) will become homeless unless he gets lucky… The SOs are left to die and their families are invisible victims. I have a hard time explaining my poor boys that their dad is not allowed at playgrounds, forest preserves or zoo! I am going insane from this injustice. The government and/or state is destroying a family Union! Pulling a poor family apart! How can this be normal or humane??? Is it even constitutional?
This is disturbing and my prays and thoughts go out to this man. It hits home in a way as I have a friend and she lives besides a sex offender. I even go into see that person once in a while. He needs care and they won’t accept him into any nursing home because he is a sex offender on the registry. Its a very sad situation.
I know one of the comments on here talks about Matthew 18.6 but that was a comparison. We can use the word “to offend or to stumble” whichever the case ma be but Jesus was saying that we need to become as little children.
Government errors on a lot of this issue. No one can serve two masters. I believe one of our leaders said once “you people haven’t been reading your bibles”.
That being said the person in this article was a veteran and it seems the love of this land has run amuck with all these laws. Folks if we all don’t get on the ball its going to be worse for all.
I would want to believe that one would want to have more compassion of a sick person than hold something against them and that is basically what a lot of these sex registry laws are doing.
Yet another miscarriage of public policy meant to circumvent monetary inclusion of our veterans with woeful pasts. The congressional and federal funding cycle is a veiled extortionate like system meant to hold entities accountable if certain expectations and agreements aren’t adhered to, among the most profilcally popular being the defunding of the ATF’s ability to determine convicts deemed rehabilitated for firearms possesion and the highly profiled and imposing Adam Walsh Act, both similarly seeking to yank federal funds like a reverse mafia tactic. Now what is newly novel to constituents, advocates and lawmakers is the unmapping of any social or earned entitlement of anything attached to registrants or former offenders. So what is not apparent to the public is that veteran sex offenders are refused crucial care all in light of their unique criminal past, due to the embedded polices injected by federal and state law, which by any means necessary are dictated what class of individuals are allowed access to these programs and facilities. So many of them were deployed who possessed underlying mental and emotional issues post deployments. I can attest to the disparities mentioned due to my extensive time in the military and multiple deployments as well as my handful of years working in many levels of law enforcement. I may include perhaps that I am a convicted offender as well who became subject to discharge from the the military just to reverse my retirement, which had no criminal stature post-conviction and post-probation. After incarceration over a decade ago I was allowed to continue to serve, promote and deploy, only to find out that I was not good enough for retirement. I litterally had retirement orders in hand and was just a few months within takin leave and vacation until the pentagon and personally Obama’s office procured a strategy to circumvent a earned retirement. It pains me that I was in the bow of a traumatic event which susbsequently led to my offense and conviction, with my spouse being raped by a soldier and 6 days later prematurely being sent off into combat with the perpetrator on the same flight. I returned home to somewhat of a Hollywood movie and became increasingly depressed. Now for a veteran who saw a way to correct his wrongs by bravely continuing to serve in the midst of adversity and dissent from a military community who seem to be vindictive as a normal citizen only speaks volumes. For one to be considered durable to travel overseas and carry a weapon as a felon is contradictory of the laws meant to prevent such trivial thoughts and actions not normally condone, for one to receive promotions based on merit and to reenlist under the same accolades are contrary to good sounding measures. I had a considerable size family to support and the army didn’t care that my family was at stake for seeking to separate me from service. I am no longer considered a RSO by the original state of my conviction and I am still considered honorably discharged but this is a severe slap in the face to pride and country but not me, for I may be battered by bruises but my heart still believes I did all I could for freedom, which doesn’t seem to be for me to enjoy of my very own. I’m embarrassed and ashamed of my country more than my conviction because it doesn’t define or represent who I am. I understand why and how my conviction happen and what led to those unfortunate set of circumstances but I can’t endow or embrace that tactics and prerogatives pursued by our congress and office of the president of the United States. Yes I have daughters and I trust myself to raise and care for them and will protect them at any cost and we they are teens even more. I am not a statistic for I own my own home I have a car and a church and I have means to fight in any form possible. So at the current time I’m in federal court over the same demise in which I’m like to prevail and restore what should rightfully be. I’m not selfish, narcissistic or a scumbag. I’m just a normal man with normal needs. Thank you for all whom serve and those who support us no matter of our past . For a president who is more concerned to polish his legacy and claim to be a constitutionalist seems far fetched to me no matter how many degrees or accolades are in “your love of self basket” . I have marched plenty of steps on this earth and sacrificed many days in government service just to be told it doesn’t count. Someone’s math is really off, because it ain’t adding up right !
Well written post. Obama is a politician and though he may be a good one, he’s still a politician. He’s still caters to the whims of the hypnotized mazes who screams wreak of conversion disorder. We heard the Charleston, West Virginia Mayor (who sounded sympathetic to our plight) say after his interview with Brenda Jones on the air that no politician will go near this and Mayor Jones should know as an elected official.
What bothers me about Obama’s rhetoric (and others) is their hypocritical talk regarding how they want to take care of VETS and their recognition that PTSD can be an issue. Certainly PTSD never directly causes someone to do something but it can have direct implications on a person’s behavior. If anyone should understand that, you would think it would be the military. And yet they cowardly disown those who, because they were traumatized by war, acted out in a way that “dishonors” the armed forces, even though those people risked their lives defending this country. And because of that mistake (and an unconstitutional set of laws enacted to begin with) the veterans administration would like to wash their hands of any registered citizen who may have been severely traumatized as a result of their service and made a mistake. We send people into war and put them in life or death situations where physical demise is a real possibility and they come home and are understandably severely traumatized, but we’ll only treat certain trauma victims. Other trauma victims (RSO’s) are untouchables. When will we ever learn?
Thank you for your post, JC. Thank you for your service, as well.
“Neighbors ask each other to watch each other’s house or watch each other’s children,” Limbaugh said.
Yeah. That’s called “victim access”. People tend to forget that a RSO had a time in his/her life when there was no criminal record for anything and everyone trusted them. Great point Sheriff Lobo.
“Residents would want to know whether their neighbors could be dangerous”, he added.
Repeat my above comment here.
*Limbaugh said he thinks the public registries also may deter some people from committing sex offenses in the first place.*
Riiiiiight. Because sex offenses don’t keep happening regardless of the laws/registeries. Just like murder has ceased because no one wants to go to prison for life.
Besides being aggravated by this typical law enforcement agent’s obvious ignorant statements, my blood was boiling when I got to the comments section.
No matter what you try to tell people, they get behind a keyboard and become the mighty Keyboard Warriors who throw insults at anyone who tries to explain to them that there are such things as FALSE ALLEGATIONS and even KIDS on the registry.
People truly believe that if someone doesn’t have a criminal record on file, they must certainly be 100% trustworthy.
We waste our time talking to such people. They don’t care to know FACTS. As far as they are concerned, their favorite politician has all the facts they need.