The Straight Story (1000+ posts) Tue Sep-02-08 02:22 PM
Original message
Carmel Dads Club bans kids’ names from team jerseys for safety
CARMEL — Concerned about protecting children from potential sexual predators, the Carmel Dads Club has banned the use of first names and nicknames on the back of team jerseys.
“We did it for safety,†said Mike McGinley, president of the organization, which oversees nearly a dozen kid sports and 12,000 young athletes.
A parent’s anxiety sparked the change.
“She raised the concern about someone coming up to a kid and saying, ‘Hi, Mary’ or ‘Hi, Jimmy’ and that might lead the youngster to believe that they knew them.â€
Roger Levesque, the chair of the Criminal Justice department at IU, said that, at first blush, the move might appear to be “unwarranted paranoia.â€
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2008...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3905525This is the kind of DUmmy overreaction that risks another generation of paranoid DUmmies. Probably the same folks who started x-raying Halloween candy and setting up child fingerprinting tables. Kids sense this fear, but don't realize how stupid it is, and grow up thinking there's a pedophile or kidnapper behind every tree. No one dares to say that cable news saturation grossly overdramatizes every tragedy, no matter how rare, or that the vast, vast majority of child abductions are somehow related to custody disputes. Even in the internet age, the weirdos are surely out there, but you usually have to go looking for them by abandoning common sense precaution. It's like finding a dead mouse in your Big Mac. Not impossible, but not something that should affect your decision-making. Besides, don't those DUmmy parents know that Rove gets a copy of every fingerprint taken?
