NC House Passes HB 88: Preserving Respect for Marriage, Not "Committed Relationships"

On Thursday this week, the House of Representatives votes 62 to 52 to adopt HB 88—Healthy Youth Act. This watered-down version of the bill  is intended to radically change our State laws govening sex education in North Carolina public schools. While the bill was amended to strip out those provisions which were most objectionable, the bottom line is that it would mandate that all schools offer a new alternative to parents for sex education—comprehensive sex education based on contraceptives and alternatives to sexual intercourse that will still encourage sexual activity.

The changes made in the House version of the bill before it passed include:

• Changing the default from comprehensive sex education to nothing, if parents fail to return the election form at the beginning of the school year.
• Allowing parents to withdraw their children from the program at any time during the school year.
• Requiring that schools provide parents with an opportunity to examine the sex education curriculum before they are required to submit their election form.
• Deleting the language that requires teaching "respect for long-term committed relationships" (which would include same-sex relationships).
• Reinserting the language of the current statute that requires teaching, “that a mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual relationship in the context of marriage is the best lifelong means of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS.”

While the bill is much improved, it still abolishes the statewide abstinence until marriage curriculum and replaces it with a "cafeteria plan" for sex education that includes three choices: abstinence until marriage; "abstinence-based" comprehensive; or nothing. Now that the most outrageous parts of the bill have been stripped out and the best parts of the current statute have been added back in, one is left to ask how the new HB 88 could possibly be an improvement over the present statute. It seems entirely unnecessary to change our current statute.

The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration, where it is rumored that Senate leadership may choose to ignore itl.

For excellent reports on the House action on HB 88, see the stories posted by the North Carolina Family Policy Council and the Christian Action League.