For some mysterious reason, there has been a lot of peeing in the news lately — not just pissing and moaning, nor just the territorial marking that comes with turf wars of various sorts, but real peeing. For example, there was the trucker who discovered a cache of brand-new televisions when he stopped to pee in the woods. There’s the editorial that ruminates on how a guy met his new neighbor when he discovered him peeing on his porch. There’s the guy who took a whizz on the supposedly well-protected property of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes — perhaps he was making a statement about their acting. Speaking of which, there’s a musical called “Urinetown” currently playing in Pennsylvania — “People pee, and we’re going to sing about it,” claims one cast member. If musicals aren’t to your taste, there’s the documentary film Q2P (aka “Queue to Pee“), which takes a sociological look at the availability of public restrooms: “When you see who has to queue to pee, you figure out who has a stake in the country’s development.” No doubt the poor guy who “had to pay with his life for answering to the call of nature” would have agreed. And the quote of the season belongs to the politician who declared, in reaction to a school that’s trying to force its male pupils to urinate sitting down, “It is a human right not to have to sit down like a girl.” Better add that one to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

What’s all this peeing have to do with perversion? The connection comes from a fascinating story called “Peeing Outside a Problem,” published in a local Massachusetts paper. The story details a number of cases of men arrested for taking a piss. It compares these to a humorous episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza relieves himself in a mall parking garage. The writer goes on to say:

While it’s funny on TV, in real life, it could land you on the sex offender registry. “Generally, anything that involves parts of the genitals being exposed results is a sexually related charge,” said Jake Wark, the deputy press secretary for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. “If convicted of a sex crime, they could be ordered to register with the state list of sex offenders.”

There is a legal difference, the article explains, between indecent exposure and “open and gross lewdness,” and public pissers convicted of the former will get slapped on the wrist while those convicted of the latter will end up on the sex offender registry.

The sex offender registry? There are obvious arguments to be made in favor of registries, and there are less obvious arguments to be made against them — often they’re full of erroneous or outdated information, and there are known ways to outwit them. But to end up on a sex offender registry for taking a leak? That’s ridiculous. Using that rationale, you could put half the crowd at any NFL game on the sex offender registry. Hell, you could probably put every male and a good many females on the list. What’s the point, then? Is a sex offender registry just tantamount to a roster of citizens, a kind of perverted form of national census?

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