ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Skenazy had met Baughman while reporting out her parenting book, Free-Range Kids, about the virtues of letting children take risks and the perils of trying to protect them from every conceivable danger. In the course of her research, Skenazy came to believe that American sex offenders were being oppressed by the criminal justice system--that in the name of protecting children, lawmakers had turned hundreds of thousands of people into helpless pariahs while doing next to nothing to make kids safer.

Baughman, who grew up in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, and attended Indiana University to study opera, arrived at the brunch wearing a blue collared shirt and a bright, friendly smile.* As he told his story, he spoke with the deliberate diction of a former theater kid.

"When I was 19, I went to prison for what was supposed to be 6½ years for having a consensual relationship with a high-school-age kid," he said. "He was 14½. He was someone I'd known for a while and was really close to."  

After he completed his prison sentence, Baughman said, the state of Virginia refused to let him out. Instead, he was kept behind bars for more than two additional years because prosecutors believed he might fit the profile of a sexually violent predator. That meant Baughman could be held against his will under what's known as "civil commitment," a form of long-term psychiatric treatment that in practice amounts to indefinite detention. (Civil commitment is legal at the federal level and in 20 states. According to the New York Times, roughly 5,000 people convicted of sex crimes are now being held under civil commitment laws around the country.)  

Despite Virginia's best efforts, Baughman won his freedom in 2012, at which point he was placed on probation and added to the state's sex offender registry. Upon his release, he set about becoming an activist on behalf of the population he would later start calling "my people." He co-founded a nonprofit called the Center for Sexual Justice, dedicated to changing "the cultural beliefs leading to unjust sex laws that effectively target sexual minorities." 

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