Fate of two LGBT-related bills uncertain

Although most folks at the State House are focused on the budget and casino gambling proposals, legislative committees have taken action on several LGBT-related bills this month. The Joint Committee on Education sent two bills, a health education bill supported by LGBT activists and a parental notification bill supported by the anti-gay group MassResistance, to study committees, normally a sign that a bill is dead for the session. Yet proponents for both bills say they expect to press on this session. Meanwhile, on Feb. 7 the Joint Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on a bill that would wipe a number of archaic laws from the books, including the state's sodomy law, but the bill's lead sponsor said she is unsure whether the committee will vote to report it out favorably.

Rep. Alice Wolf (D-Cambridge), one of the lead sponsors of House Bill 597, which would require school districts to institute health curricula, said that while the education committee sent her bill to a study committee, she and other proponents are pushing for language on health education to be included in the Fiscal Year 2009 budget, a version of which is currently being drafted in the House. Wolf, a member of the education committee, said she and committee chairwoman Rep. Patricia Haddad (D-Somerset) will press for funding for the Department of Education to study the state of health education in the state's public schools and create a plan to expand heath education.

"Chairwoman Haddad and I had an agreement that we would try to proceed with this agenda of trying to move forward with a health education curriculum through the budget process. And whether or not that will be successful we do not know," said Wolf.

While the bill is not explicitly LGBT-focused, anti-gay advocates including MassResistance have accused proponents of using the bill to sneak pro-LGBT content into the schools because the state's health education frameworks include discussion of LGBT people and issues. MassResistance founder Brian Camenker and several of his supporters testified against the bill during a hearing last May (see "Nazis? AIDS? Camenker must be talking about the gays again," May 31, 2007).

Wolf said from her discussions with fellow committee members she does not believe they were swayed by MassResistance's arguments in their decision to send the bill to study, but the controversy they created did hurt the bill.

"I think what it did is raise [that] there's some controversy around this, and there's a certain amount of resistance around here to do things that have controversy," said Wolf.

Meanwhile, MassResistance's bill to force schools to seek parental permission before including any discussion of LGBT-related topics in the classroom, Senate Bill 321, also got sent to committee. In an update on the MassResistance website the group claims that it plans to fight to get the bill passed out of the study committee.

"Although it's rare, it's not really difficult for a committee chairman to pull a bill out of study and back into the legislative stream. It's just going to take the kind of pressure that parents put on the Legislature a dozen years ago, when the original Parental Notification Law was introduced and the Education Committee was equally hostile to that bill," reads the update. "We put enormous pressure on them, and it got through."

Bestiality is no joke
Meanwhile Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem's bill to remove archaic laws from the books, S.B. 905, came up for a hearing before the judiciary committee, but Creem said she is uncertain if they will take action on the bill. She said she has filed versions of the legislation for several years in a row, but she said lawmakers and the public do not seem to take the bill seriously, in large part because of its rewriting of the state's bestiality laws. Creem said the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has asked her to rewrite the laws, which currently only penalize sexual abuse of hoofed animals, to include all animals.

"For whatever reason, every year we have this same discussion, and it turns into something that's made light of," said Creem.

Beyond rewriting the bestiality law, the legislation also strikes laws around sodomy - which have historically been used to target gay men in cruising areas - blasphemy, fornication, and criminalization of abortion. While most of these laws have not been enforced for years, Creem said that given their intent, it is important to wipe them from the books.

"Most of these laws are laws against women, against minorities, and I think we just need to make a statement and once and for all get rid of them," said Creem.