Thanks to Oregon for setting the newest low in stupidity in public schools.

Unruly schoolboys or sex offenders?

The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran — what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher's aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.

After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?

Yep.  For daring to lay hands upon the female caboose, they are sex offenders.

Last year, in a previously undisclosed prosecution, he charged two other Patton Middle School boys with felony sex abuse for repeatedly slapping the bottom of a female student. Both pleaded guilty to harassment, which is a misdemeanor. Berry declined to discuss his cases against Mashburn and Cornelison.

The boys and their parents say Berry has gone far beyond what is necessary, criminalizing actions that they acknowledge were inappropriate. School district officials said Friday they had addressed the incident by suspending the students for five days.

The outlines of the case have been known. But confidential police reports and juvenile court records shed new light on the context of the boys' actions. The records show that other students, boys and girls, were slapping one another's bottoms. Two of the girls identified as victims have recanted, saying they felt pressured and gave false statements to interrogators.

The documents also show that the boys face 10 misdemeanor charges — five sex abuse counts, five harassment counts — reduced from initial charges of felony sex abuse. The boys are scheduled to go on trial Aug. 20.

Apparently what most of us could not see was as they slapped the rear ends, in some super speed harassment they also attempted rape or something.

I keep asking this question and I will continue to ask it:  What the hell is wrong with people?  When did we lose common sense to political correctness?

This is not rape, this is not sex abuse.  Was it appropriate?  No.  It was juvenile and immature.

But it was not a damn sex crime.

And there is a double standard.  Some of the girls swatted the butts in return because it was seen as a greeting.

All told, Roache interviewed 14 students besides Cornelison and Mashburn. Seven confessed to bottom-swatting, including one girl who described it as "a handshake we do." Two of the alleged victims said they had swatted boys' buttocks themselves.

"She will touch Cory after he touches her first," Roache wrote in the report

By their logic, the girls should rape a boy in return when they are raped.

And no charges are filed against the young ladies of course.

Case disturbs experts

Tillery, Patton's vice principal, said he was not authorized to comment. School district officials said Friday that they take sexual abuse seriously. "We followed our policy and set a five-day suspension," the district superintendent said in a statement. "The district played no role in the legal proceedings that followed."

Roache, the McMinnville police officer, declined to discuss the case. His supervisor, Capt. Rob Edgell, would not discuss specifics but said, "We totally support everything that has gone on in this case."

Outside experts contacted by The Oregonian found the circumstances unsettling.

While it's true that a great deal of child sex abuse by adults goes undetected and unpunished, cases like the one in McMinnville reflect society's tendency to overreact, said Richard Ofshe, author of "Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria."

"The problem is that, like most good things, they can go to the extreme, and the extreme has been reached in several ways," said Ofshe, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. "The whole question of what constitutes sexual abuse gets defined and redefined to the point where it's absurd."

Indeed.  What we are turning into is a hyper-sensitive culture where the very act of touching one is anathema.

We also have kids in school that have lost all connection with their childhood, the real shame in this.