Very good analogy!

I've posted about this sometime ago someone had an article referring to this topic but I can't remember who

Yeah, unfair rap

I think people like pitt bulls more than SOs.

Oh yes Nak I agree. The unfair stigma pit bulls have that they are "biters" is similar to the unfair stigma RSOs have that they will commit another sex crime. But of course people like pit bulls better, in a popularity contest I think RSOs lose to almost everything.

I would consider SO's more akin to snakes. (Please, don't take it the wrong way!)

Snakes are often seen as terrible creatures, lurking in wait for its next victim, much like how SOs are seen.
Most people will say, "The only good snake is a dead one", much like those of the same mindset as Valerie believe that SOs shouldn't have rights and that what they have now is better than rotting in a cage or dead.
Sure, some will bite, but more often than not? They're just another living creature, capable of love and understanding.

n. n Maybe I feel this way due to my inability to keep dogs, yet can keep 7 snakes.

I found this passage in the book "The Faithful Executioner: Live and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century," by Joel F. Harrington:

"Since the Middle Ages, professional executioners had been universally reviled as cold-blooded killers for hire and accordingly excluded from respectable society at every turn. Most were forced to live outside the city walls or near an already unclean location within the city, typically the slaughteryard or a lazar house (for lepers). Their legal disenfranchisement was just as thorough: no executioner or family member could hold citizenship, be admitted to a guild, hold public office, serve as a legal guardian or trial witness, or even write a valid will. Until the late fifteenth century, these outcasts received no legal protection from mob violence in the event of a botched execution, and a few were actually stoned to death by angry spectators. In most towns, hangmen - as they were most commonly known - were forbidden to enter a church. And if an executioner wished to have his child baptized or desired last rites for a dying relative, he depended on the willingness of the sometimes less-than-compassionate local priest to set foot in an "unclean" residence. They were also banned from bathhouses, taverns, and other public buildings, and it was virtually unheard of for an executioner to enter the home of any respectable person. People of Franz Schmidt's era harbored such a pervasive fear of social contamination at the very touch of an executioner's hand that respectable individuals jeopardized their very livelihoods by even casual contact. Folklore abounded with tales of the disasters that befell those who broke this ancient taboo, and of beautiful condemned maidens who chose death over marriage to willing hangmen."

Alas, scapegoating - turning people into social outcasts and pariahs - has a long history.