Moral Puritanism is Alive and Well in the US

They don't put your in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at you like in the "good old days", but in the US they still have a strange idea of moral turpitude and they will punish you for crimes like "sitting in a park to eat a donut without an accompanying minor". Seriously.

Here's a bit from the Gothamist:

The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like...eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this weekend the police gave two young women in Bed-Stuy summonses for eating doughnuts in a playground while unaccompanied by a minor.

Tickets for being an adult in or around a playground have been popping up fairly frequently lately—see the Inwood chess players—but instead of giving the offending citizens a warning and urging them to leave, the NYPD's M.O. appears to be to hand out a ticket. Here's how our reader, an anthropology graduate student, describes her experience this weekend.

Go read the whole article.

I'm waiting for the police to arrest you for have "unclean thoughts". And I'm trying to think up an appropriate punishment for such a deviant. Maybe incarcerate you like the Magdalene asylums in Ireland that imprisoned unwed mothers and abused girls forcing them into slave-like drudgery in their infamous "Magdalene launderies".

Everybody knows that clean and tidy parks are next to Godliness. And there is no better way to keep them clean and tidy than to ban people from the parks. Keep them pristine. Wall them off. Put up restrictions like "a person can only enter this park while carrying an infant in the left arm on a Tuesday while have 'pure thoughts' about God and his graciousness". That will keep the park clean and wholesome!