The idea that you can commit a crime, repent, reform, and make a new start is something that is fundamentally interwoven with Christianity. We cannot cut off the hand of a thief because he or she could someday use that hand in the service of loved ones, society, and the Creator.

The making of lists that disallow this principle for certain types of people does have a realistic element - sexuality, however unusual, tends to be ongoing - but it punishes those who master their sexual defects in order to contain the fraction who do not. It also gets the legal system off the hook if there are public complaints about any recidivism. It is thus collective punishment based on social and political convenience.

Collective punishment is part of the ethos of the ancient Middle East (among other places) - the slaughter of the innocent, the killing, raping and pillaging of all and sundry in battle. Christianity tried in many ways to get out of this drift into genocidal thinking, and much of the structure of world peacemaking and international ethics is based on its ideas of restraint on profligate aggression.

So what this type of rule in the U.S. really shows is that the U.S. is slowly becoming a bloodthirsty, gun-addled, non- or pseudo-Christian society where people thrill and cheer at the idea of prisoners they don't like being raped and savaged by other prisoners. It's becoming a nation of vengeance. Vengeance is not the Lord's any more. So it's fine to afflict the reformed with endless punishment. They don't matter as humans and revenge against them on this earth is endless and boundless.