Legislative Week in Review

Special Report - April 6, 2009
Family Issues Abound With the Senate still working on the state budget, this week the House turned its attention to other issues such as smoking bans, fixing the health plan for state employees, and electing members to the UNC System Board of Governors.

Meanwhile our efforts were focused on several bills that will affect families in a more direct way. Chief among these is HB88-Healthy Youth Act. We argue this bill would make our youth less healthy by allowing schools to tell teens that sex is fine as long as you try not to get a sexually transmitted disease. We need to tell teens the truth about sex and that it is a serious issue. Contraceptives do not fully protect from most sexually transmitted diseases and do nothing to protect the heart and the conscience. For more about this issue, read our story to the left.

Next week looks like another busy week in the House as HB88 will likely be on the floor of the House or back in a committee. The House Education Committee is scheduled to deal with the issue of corporal punishment (spanking) in public schools when they take up HB442-Parental Involvement in School Discipline. The House Judiciary 3 Committee plans to consider HB590-Study Grandparents' Visitation Rights. This is one of those issues that has been around, and back again, for the past 12 or so years and the issue has been studied to death. The bottom line every time is that interfering with the parental rights of intact families to allow a judge to grant visitation rights to grandparents or anyone else is a bad idea. Finally, the Senate Judiciary 2 Committee will look at SB7-Allow Hunting on Sunday, which would repeal the ban on Sunday Hunting in the North Carolina. The fact that this bill has been defeated every session for a decade and a majority of hunters oppose lifting the ban does not provide inoculation against repetitive consideration.

Finally, as we write this email, the Iowa Supreme Court has today unanimously legalized same-sex "marriage" in that state. By striking down Iowa's 1998 marriage statute, Iowa becomes the third state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, regardless of residency. We will soon have more details on the case and its impact on North Carolina on our Web site at ncfamily.org.

Copyright © 2009. North Carolina Family Policy Council. All rights reserved.