Out here on the wind-swept drifts of McLeod County, decorum appears to have restrained local news coverage of the case of Lester Prairie molester, Jason Leo Blashack; so much, in truth, that there has been none at all that Bluestem has been able to excavate from the archives of any local paper.
Thus, I learned tha the news that Jason Blashack stripped of law license after molesting 15-year-old from the website of the metropolitan weekly, the City Pages.
Perhaps the salacious details of the case restrained our chaste local editors. CP Staff writer Nick Pinto reports:
Blashack pleaded guilty last June to criminal sexual conduct. The charges stemmed from a February 2010 incident in which Blashack fondled the breast of a 15-year-old girl while the two were watching television, according to the complaint. The victim told investigators that "she froze, was scared, and didn't know what to do."
The girl told her mother immediately, but the mother opted not to report the incident to authorities. It wasn't until two months later that a mandated reporter contacted McLeod County Social Services about the incident.
The molester served 30 days in the hoosegow for the felony, and has had his legal license suspended for at least two years.
Perhaps McLeod County's editors had another reason to hold back on coverage: Blashack's own personal safety. After all, Lester Prairie isn't far from Glencoe, home base of the legislature's own crusader against deviants, Representative Glenn Gruenhagen. Indeed, a mere hop on Highway 212, then a jump on McLeod County 9 will get you to sunny Lester Prairie from Glencoe.
Earlier this week, Gruenhagen prescribed castration for sex offenders, as Bluestem noted in The cruelest cut of all: Glenn Gruenhagen recommends barnyard remedy for sex offenders. My colleagues at the City Pages take a more graphic reading of the freshman legislator's remarks in Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen excited about farmyard castration for sex offenders.
Thus, McLeod County media may only seek to protect Blashack from Gruenhagen's rapier, er, wit. From the City Pages:
With the costs of Minnesota's sex-offender treatment program spiking, one legislator wants to consider a solution grounded in our state's fine agricultural history: castration.
Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen introduced his preference for farmyard justice when staff from the Minnesota Sex Offender Program were at the Capitol Tuesday to introduce their program to the new members of the House Public Safety Committee.[link added by BSP]
The Pinto passage calls attention to the spiking costs for warehousing sex offenders; when that cost and Gruenhagen's castration solution are factored together, a novel and modest proposal for the growing problem of what to do with sex offenders becomes obvious.
Gruenhagen observed in committee: "It sure worked well on the farm, I'll tell you that."
Castrating a bull calf or shoat not only makes steers and barrows less rammy, but also makes their flesh less gamey. Given that the cost of feeding Minnesota's prison population is also an undue burden on the taxpayer (former state representative and Minority Leader Marty Seifert famously was moved to recommend taking away inmates' dessert and to offer only two meals a day on weekends), the answer is obvious.
Let's fix the offenders, fatten them up, butcher them, and feed them to the rest of the incarcerated community. Not only will the eunuchs, deprived of the joy of life, be jonesing for an swift end to their torment, but they will go to the knacker secure in the knowledge that they are finally paying back the community they harmed.
As a CBS News report noted in 2003:
"We have to make sure the rapists and murderers sacrifice like everyone else," said Minnesota state Rep. Marty Seifert, author of the state's "brunch" bill.
Admittedly, a full-grown man, not snipped before the age of 20, is said by the effete gourmands of Cambridge and Boston to be rather strong tasting like bull elk or bison, and so culinary skills of the prison food service will be tested to its fullest at first. However, the economies of the system will soon be clear to both law and order, so the police and courts will have incentive to pluck tender offenders before their beards fully set.
As I have no sons of my own to drop in the maw of the prison system-nor do I cavort with coercive gentlemen--I offer this proposal entirely as a disinterested citizen. Surely, the gentle people serving on the House public safety committee will recognise in this proposal that thoughtful problem-solving spirit which guided Glenn Gruenhagen's words earlier this week.
Image: Castration, image via the CP.
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