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Re-draft of "Planned Parenthood" bill by Judiciary Committee -- sent forward to full LegislatureBill is completely watered down version of original. Now relatively harmless(see text of bill below)POSTED: March 17, 2010Planned Parenthood's major goal for the last several years has been to (1) add "health" education to the state's formal education requirements, and (2) use the radical 1999 Health Frameworks document as a requirement for passing to higher grades, and for graduating. Among the topics it would require for kids: homosexual "identity", abortion counseling, gender issues. For the last three sessions Planned Parenthood has filed bills to do this. They've put great effort into trying to lobby the Legislature. Each time we've fought hard to stop it. Here's our analysis of the bill when it was filed last session, as H597. Ominous "state-wide study"This year's effort included three bills filed: H3434, S218, and H402, (all sponsored by the usual gang of leftists at the State House). This year the Education Committee "compromised" with Planned Parenthood by approving a re-drafted version of H402 (below). This new version has virtually all of the odious requirements removed. In its place it requires a statewide study of "each of the 14 comprehensive health standards recommended in the [1999] Massachusetts comprehensive health curriculum frameworks." The study should identify "effective" health education programs and recommend them. Also, other data such as how many students opt out, hours in health class, etc., would be collected. We are not naive about this. It's been part of their fallback plan for a while, which has been (1) watering down the bill for now and adding the more uncomfortable parts later, and (2) doing a state-wide study to gather facts. We can see that this is most likely a scheme to craft more of the unreliable and unscientific official "statistics" and "findings" that we often see from that state bureaucracy regarding sexuality and homosexuality -- to be used eventually to persuade the Legislature to pass their full-strength version bill.
H402 - AN ACT RELATIVE TO HEALTH EDUCATION SECTION 1. The department of elementary and secondary education shall conduct a statewide study and submit a report on the provision of health education by each school district and Commonwealth charter school. The report shall include the following data for each public school and Commonwealth charter school: health education curriculum offered by grade level; the number of students receiving health education by grade level; health education requirements by grade level; the number of students who opt-out of any portion of the health education curriculum under the provisions of section 32A of chapter 71; and the approximate number of hours spent, by grade level, on each of the 14 comprehensive health standards recommended in the Massachusetts comprehensive health curriculum frameworks. The report shall also include the number of districts that are promoting effective health education programming and practices, including those programs and practices that are deemed less effective, and those that should be identified as model programs. The department of elementary and secondary education, in consultation with the department of public health, shall report to the general court the results of its investigation and study and its recommendations, if any, together with any drafts of legislation necessary to carry out such recommendations, by filing the same with the clerk of the senate and house, who shall forward the same to the chairs of the joint committee on education, and the chairs of the senate and house committee on ways and means on or before June 30, 2011. The department of elementary and secondary education shall submit an update to the joint committee on education on the status of efforts to complete this report on or before December 31, 2010.
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