mr. chairman , i thank the chairman 's generosity . 
i understand his generosity and if he would allow me to conclude two or three comments about what i saw , i would be happy to accept a voice vote . 
mr. chairman , i just wanted to put in the record , why , if you are kind enough to accept this , this is so very important . 
as i spoke to the evacuees , what they said to me was that in the superdome there were outright examples of rape and abuse of children . 
they may not have been the family members ; but in that instance , if the family members are lost , an expedited foster care and an expedited adoption would be relevant . 
if in this instance of this law we can expedite those background checks and have this language in this bill , i certainly know that it would help the thousands of children that may be impacted . 
let me conclude by saying that i hope , as i indicated before , that we will initiate a children 's initiative to address the concerns of these children . 
but if this language is placed in this bill , at least they will have a placeholder that their cases will be expedited so that their lives can be put back in place and so that sex offenders will not be the ones to be adopting and/or have foster care of these vulnerable children . 
as was the case with september 11 , hurricane katrina has left many children without their natural parents . 
many kids are now wondering who will care for them and how their needs will be met . 
not only is this enormous pressure on a child but it greatly diminishes the joys of childhood . 
my amendment would set forth a sense of congress that background checks conducted as a precondition to approval of any foster or adoptive placement of children affected by a natural disaster or terrorist attack should be expedited in order to ensure that such children do not become subjected to the offenses enumerated in this act . 
while family members often step in to take care of children who have lost their natural parents , these family members usually only have limited resources and as a result , the child as we all watched the devastating stories of hurricane katrina unfold , it was very disturbing to me to learn that several minors were raped while waiting to be rescued from the new orleans superdome . 
this is a prime example of the many negative situations that can arise as a result of a natural disaster which displaces children from their parents , or even causes the parents lives to be lost . 
as a parent and chair of the children 's caucus , i am very concerned with the well being of our nation 's children . 
as natural disasters seem to be more prevalent in our society , we must begin to think about how we care for those children who lose their natural parents . 
this amendment is not intended to circumvent the precondition background check for approval of any foster or adoptive placement ; it is only intended to speed the process up so we can get these displaced children with loving and caring families . 
in closing , just like most other states , louisiana has an open and searchable sex offender registry . 
the primary party responsible in most communities for checking up on the status of sex offenders who have served their sentences but must register is the local police . 
however , the police and local law officials are swamped with the task of rescuing survivors and ensuring that every one gets out of the city . 
this makes it difficult to monitor the moves and whereabouts of registered sex offenders . 
in addition , as the citizens of new orleans and other states wait for assistance in cities around the country , sex offenders are among innocent children who have lost their natural parents and are vulnerable . 
in these troubled times , let us not leave our children helpless . 
i have a feeling i could be accused of a kind of insensitivity , or at worst a sort of obsessiveness by bringing this up now , but after reading about some of the terrible things that have been said to have happened in new orleans after the destruction wrought by hurricane katrina on august 29 , 2005 , this idea occurred to me in a kind of lightbulb moment . 
sex crimes are part of war . 
war produces an anarchic mindset . 
so does a disaster on the scale of what we have seen in louisiana and southern mississippi . 
just as invading soldiers from various countries in the past have made sexual assault a part of their subjugating of a native population , so the criminals loose on the streets in new orleans and even inside the superdome have made sexual assault another part of their overall orgy of violence . 
in the entry i wrote earlier today i wrote briefly of the horrific story coming out of the superdome of the rape and murder of a little girl , followed by the beating death at the hands of 10 men of the perpetrator . 
i began thinking about how many people must be unaccounted for in new orleans and the surrounding region devastated by the storm . 
the number must be astonishing , just as we keep hearing the final death toll will be . 
of the survivors who have made it this long and perhaps been able to get to refuge in other states , whatever procedures officials who run shelters in these states have in place for registering who stays there must certainly take into account the fact that many people left their homes so quickly and under such duress that they may have only the clothes on their backs -- no identification , money , etc . 
registered sex offenders , of course , are more closely accounted for than other citizens . 
louisiana has an open and searchable sex offender registry just like many other states across the u.s. the primary party responsible in most communities for checking up on the status of sex offenders who have served their sentences but must register are the local police . 
as we know , it is all the new orleans p.d . 
can do at the moment to maintain their number and keep cops from walking off or getting killed themselves . 
just like everyone else , the cops have lost family , homes , in a sense , their lives . 
we can surmise that if the death toll from katrina in louisiana alone is as high as 10 , 000 , as has been reported in the mainstream media , a number of sex offenders will have succumbed to the storm and its aftermath . 
we can also guess that if the larger portion of the population of new orleans was able to leave before the storm , or has now been taken to refugee centers in surrounding states , a larger number of sex offenders are now not just out of the residence registered in the louisiana offender database , but quite possibly off the grid completely and free to throw off what many of them surely must view as the shackles of having to register and have their faces placed on the internet next to a summary of whatever crimes they were convicted of committing . 
of that number , a percentage will be considered what many states refer to as level iii sex offender . 
the most likely to use violence in the commission of their crimes , and the most likely to re-offend . 
click on the thumbnail inserted into the first paragraph of this blog entry to see a screen capture of a map i made at mapsexoffenders.com , the service that matches up sex offender databases with maps and satellite photos and marks the registered offenders ' homes with a red balloon . 
the blue balloon on the large map you see when you look at the screen cap i made represents the city center of new orleans . 
the red balloons , which you will see are numerous , represent all the registered offenders ' addresses . 
as i said , some of those offenders are likely victims of this epochal storm just like many other residents of the big easy . 
but a larger number of them probably survived . 
of those who survived , there will be some who truly are trying to live the `straight ' life , and they will likely be dutiful in reporting their identities and true status as a registered sex offender . 
but there may even be a larger number who realize that a remarkable opportunity has presented itself . 
