The daycare center makes it more spiritual I guess, because known pervert James Nichols could attend another church that has no day care, but for some mysterious reason he just needs to attend a church that has one. From Fox:

RALEIGH, N.C.  —  Convicted sex offender James Nichols said he was trying to better himself by going to church. But the police who arrested him explained: The church is off-limits because it has a daycare center.

Now Nichols is challenging North Carolina’s sex-offender laws in a case that pits the constitutional right to religious freedom against the state’s goal of protecting the public from child molesters.

“I just started asking the question, ‘Why? Why am I being treated this way after trying to better myself?”‘ said Nichols, a 31-year-old who was twice convicted of indecent liberties with a teen girl and again in 2003 for attempted second-degree rape. “The law gives you no room to better yourself.”

At issue in Nichols’ case and a similar one in Georgia are day care centers and youth programs at houses of worship where sex offenders can come into proximity with children. Sex offender advocates agree some convicts should not be allowed around children, but they contend barring all offenders denies them support needed to become productive citizens.

“Criminalizing the practice of religion for everyone on the registry will do more harm than good,” said Sara Totonchi, policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights. “With these laws, states are driving people on the registry from their faith community and depriving them of the rehabilitative influence of the church.”

Or the easy access to victims. The state isn’t banning this rapist from church, just from hanging around day care facilities. But the organized sex offender advocate movement is using this case to challenge the common sense restrictions society agrees to put on people who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Felons cannot buy guns, drug addicts cannot be given custody of children and sex offenders cannot congregate near or loiter in places where children gather. Common sense, right?

Wrong:

In Georgia, the Southern Center for Human Rights sued the state in part because the law there prevents offenders from volunteering in places of worship. The lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia’s 16,000-plus registered sex offenders is pending in federal court.

Katherine Parker, legal director for the ACLU of North Carolina, said she was not aware of religion-based challenges to sex-offender laws in any other states. The ACLU is helping in Nichols’ case.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said preventing offenders from attending religious services is another in a series of increasingly unforgiving laws adopted across the country. Some of the laws have pushed offenders out of homes and entire communities.

“This case is part of a much larger group of cases dealing with the expansive sex-offender laws,” Turley said. “The state cannot sentence someone to a life of being an agnostic or an atheist without violating the constitution.“

Except that’s not at all what’s going on here. One need not go to church to be a Christian at all so Johnathan Turley’s hyperventilating aside no one has been sentenced to a life time of Atheism. But there are in fact many Christian churches that don’t have day cares, and frankly many Catholic churches hold Mass several times a week so I’m sure an offender can work out a schedule to receive the salvation that will ultimately be denied him no matter what the Reverends say when they’re passing around the collection plate.

Turley isn’t the only pro-easy access to victim advocate in this story though. There is of course known liar and con artist Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch:

“It’s not clear that there’s any public-safety purpose to these laws. They continue to ostracize previous sex offenders in a way that could be dangerous in the end,” said Sarah Tofte, a legal researcher with Human Rights Watch. “If they can successfully transition to the community, to include going to church, they are less likely to reoffend.”

Who’s Sarah Tofte and why am I coming down so hard on her? Absolute Zero United gives the best overview of this charlatan who sought out some of the most violent and depraved sex offender activists (including Zman-the man responsible for spreading the false charges about Mark Lundsford being a child porn collector) to write her 146 page pro-pedophilia opus for Human Rights Watch which concludes that not only should sex offenders not be “persecuted” by society, but that sex offenders shouldn’t even be required to report their status to schools they work in!

Understand that Sarah Tofte authored a report for Human Rights Watch in which one of the conclusions presented is that pedophiles should be able to slip through the cracks and teach at schools because it’s too restrictive on pedophiles for schools to be required to check employees against the registry.

Tofte is an advocate for sex offenders, not “human rights,” and frankly one the media should question as to how she arrives at her conclusions. Tofte insinuates it’s more dangerous to ostracize sex offenders than allow them to “re-integrate” into the community, and laments the dissolution of their family lives and personal relationships while on the registry. But her report suggests that most sex offenses happen within the confines of family or family-like relationships and other positions of trust. If we follow her recommendations then, by the conclusions we draw from her own research,we would have more sexual abuse when offenders settled into new environments with easy access to victims who are unaware of their proclivities.

Tofte is a hack with a political axe to grind and she’s using rapists to do it. There is only one reason pedophiles and rapists seek out day cares, and if Nichols was really interested in reforming he’d avoid teens and children the way alcoholics avoid bars and liquor stores. But Totfe and the rest of these “human rights” advocates don’t care about that. What they care about is getting Americans to accept a worldview wherein every person, even rapists, are actually victims. And if their activism creates more victims so much the better.

After all it’s how they make a living.