Sexual abuse of of any kind is disgusting and warrants serious punishment. So how is it that in my right-wing, ultra-conservative, values-based, homogenized, home-grown, white-bread Lancaster county a perv like this gets away with anything less than a life sentence?

Lancaster Online.com: News : Lititz man jailed for molesting 6 girls, is deemed ‘predator’

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA – A Lititz man wept this morning as former friends and their daughters berated him for sexually molesting six young girls over a period of several years.

The victims want justice….

“I want you to pay for what you’ve done to us,’’ a teenager who was one of the victims told Charles James Mellinger, 41, of 327 N. New St., looking at him in a Lancaster County Courtroom.

“To all of us,’’ she added.

“What you did to my daughter was reprehensible,’’ one of the girls’ fathers told Mellinger. But to assault multiple little girls, he added, “is reprehensible.’’

The guy even agrees he is a scumbag….

“What I did was despicable,’’ Mellinger told Allison, apologizing to the victims, their parents and his own family.

And then the judge comes back with the limp-noodle sentence….

When the victims and attorneys finished talking, Judge Paul K. Allison sentenced Mellinger to 2 1/2 to 5 years in state prison, plus 7 years of probation.

That works out to 5 – 10 months per girl.

Maybe we should go back to the Code of Hammurabi on this one…

If a man violate the wife (betrothed or child-wife) of another man, who has never known a man, and still lives in her father’s house, and sleep with her and be surprised, this man shall be put to death, but the wife is blameless.