Rep. Walorski has introduced HB 1097 which won’t convince anyone to drop the “Wacky Jackie” tag anytime soon. It’s a hyper-specific piece of legislation that creates a new Class D felony which prohibits someone classified as an offender against children from “participating in Halloween” between 4 and 10 p.m. on October 31.
Participating in Halloween means handing out candy, turning on a porch light, or displaying a pumpkin.
So, if I have this straight, for 6 hours a year, turning on your light = felony.
I’m getting visions of sex offenders taking off work and rushing home in a panic because they forgot and left a pumpkin on their porch.
This comes under the same heading as several that have been proposed each year: “There ought to be a law”. It would seem that in some of the legislators mind there is simply no subject that should not be defined “clearly” in terms of laws–just can not have too many laws. Now if we could get some of the members to just vote in some manner but lockstep with what the party leaders tell them. We send seemly intelligent people and then they dumbly play follow the leader.
This, like so many knee-jerk anecdotal legislative bids, is less about passing a bill and more about having something to croon about to the homefolk.
I’m taken back to the early seventies when as I sat on the living room floor while Walter Cronkite told my dad and I that a governor from Alabama or North Carolina or some such southern state was demanding criminal pornography charges against Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner and Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione.
Cronkite went on to point out that it was not the Governor’s ability to file such criminal charges and that there was little if any likelihood that any of the three publishers would go to the state to enter a plea in court.
Before Walter could say, In other news…” I blurted out, “Well that’s stupid. Why would the governor do that if he knew it wasn’t going to do anything.”
My father, wiser than he was outspoken, mumbled, “Because now everyone in his home state knows that he is against pornography.”
It was at that moment that I first became aware of politics.
Not all that surprising given that the sponsor helps extend Haloween to more than six hours when the Indiana legislature is in session.