Free Jennifer Wilbanks!

For having the moral courage to break out of the impending strangehold of wedlock, and the panache to tap into America's unrequited love affair with all things reminiscent of Julia Roberts, former bride Jennifer Wilbanks faces possible criminal charges.

Since when is making a desperate bolt from conformity a crime? Since when is buying a bus ticket evidence of "premeditation"? Premeditated what -- downward mobility?

It is Wilbank's pathetic friends,family, and police force in suburban Atlanta who are to be blamed for mounting a $100,000 search effort for her -- a flagrant waste of resources in pursuit of an adult woman, who, since she was white and pretty, was apparently as infantilized by those who knew her as she is now by the media who have dubbed her the "runaway bride."

Need I remind people that little brown and black and probably white children disappear every day, without a nation-wide media circus? Remember the days of the late-nineteenth century, when moral panics over "white slavery" bizarrely identified the interstate traffic in white women for illicit purposes as the primary social problem in America -- this in the era of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Plessy v. Ferguson? What's that creepy sound? Oooh, the sound of history repeating itself.