AFA-IN Legislative Update – American Family Association of Indiana
Bills Appear, Biden Vacations, Faith vs Politics
The Legislature Begins
The 2023 session of the Indiana General Assembly began on Monday. We are now seeing some bills appear. Here are a few of interest:
SB 1 (Crider) – This legislation is likely part of the major mental health agenda item of this session. We are reviewing this, but one thought is that parental consent would be a good amendment to an expansion of mental health services.
SB 12 (Tomes) – This bill has passed both the House and Senate in past sessions, but not both at once, thus sending it to the governor. It removes the exemption schools have to the crime of the distribution of matter harmful to minors. Matter harmful to minors is pornography. It is not Huckleberry Finn or Pride and Prejudice as some opponents claimed as a scare tactic. It is a term county prosecutors understand as pornographic items. HB 1130 (Cash) is a House version of this legislation.
SB 72 (Leising) – This bill has passed the Senate at least six times, but never in the House. It requires schools to teach cursive writing.
SB 153 (Charbonneau) – This bill would allow pharmacists to prescribe contraceptives. It will be interesting to see if doctors perceive this as an intrusion into their role as medical examiners of patients before prescriptions are written. SB 206 (Breaux) and HB 1224 (Fleming) are similar bills, but they do not specifically exclude abortion drugs.
HB 1011 (Pierce) – This is a bill for euthanasia.
HB 1036 (Cash) – This bill requires school board candidates to run under a party affiliation like every other candidate for office.
HB 1066 (Errington) – This bill is an attack on abstinence education in schools.
HB 1231 (Lauer) – This bill prohibits gender transition surgeries and drugs to be used on minors.
HB 1232 (Lauer) – This bill prohibits the Department of Child Services from removing a child from a home over disagreements between the parents (or guardians) and the child over gender identity.
You can view filed bills here:
https://beta.iga.in.gov/legislative/2023/bills
Leaving Your Faith at the Chamber Door
There is an interesting item about the new congress that reminds me of something a State Senator said to me many years ago. He said, “a lot of my colleagues seem to leave their faith in the hallway before they enter the chamber to cast a vote.”
The item notes that in the 118th Congress, 28% of the membership identifies as Catholic. This is the largest religious affiliation demographic. The Catholic Church is quite clear that abortion goes against God’s plan. Support for it is sinful. So where do these members stand on that issue?
One might think that this is a tricky question here for the Catholic Democrats in particular, because if your party platform supports abortion (which it does) but your church doesn’t (and it doesn’t), where do you stand? Which principles matter more to you when they are in conflict – your faith, or your politics?
In the US House, there are 65 Democrats who identify as Catholic, of those 54 have a perfect pro-abortion voting record and all 10 of the new members have taken campaign positions supporting abortion funding, services, abortifacient drugs, etc.
Of the 56 House Republicans who are Catholic 48 have a 100% pro-life voting record, one has a mostly pro-life record and the seven new members who are Catholic have taken pro-life positions. This means that 98% of the Catholic House Democrats are pro-abortion and 100% of Catholic House Republicans are pro-life.
By the way, those who say your faith should be separate from your political views are asking for the impossible. In my observation, every vote on a moral matter reflects what that legislator believes, whether they are religious or not.
Missing Inaction
In his first two years as President, Joe Biden has been on vacation more than any other president during this same time. The President has also done fewer press conferences and interviews than any of his recent predecessors.
In fact, two out of every five days of his presidency Biden has been on vacation. He has spent 282 days (of his time in office thus far) on vacation, with 191 days in Delaware and 66 days at Camp David.
People can defend the President noting that in some ways, a president is never really on vacation, but it is undeniable he has been kept out of sight from the public and media for 40% of his tenure.
Everyone wonders if Joe Biden is running the show. He doesn’t do much even when he is at the White House (according to his public schedule), but it’s kind of insulting when he and his Press Secretary said for as long as they could, that he was “too busy” to go to the Southern Border.
By the way, when he did finally go to the border for the first time (in decades) on Sunday, he seemed to confuse a person with the Salvation Army for one of his secret service agents.
Voting By Truck
U-Haul movers have released their annual “U-Haul Growth Index” which tracks the demand for their rental trucks and their destination.
The top two moving destinations are Texas (#1) and Florida (#2). Indiana ranked 14th.
At the bottom, the states that people are moving to the least (and leaving the most) are California (#50), Illinois (#49), Michigan (#48) Massachusetts (#47), and New York (#46).
A Sad Sign of Our Moral Decay
There are many things this title could fit, but when people are in positions of trust with children, numbers like the following are a particularly disturbing sign of our nation’s problems.
“A year-long analysis conducted by Fox News Digital revealed that from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 of 2022, at least 349 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators were arrested on child sex crimes. The 349 educators included five principals, three assistant principals, 290 teachers, 26 substitute teachers and 25 teachers’ aides spanning nearly every state in the country. At least 262 of the arrests, or 75%, involved alleged crimes against students.”
In Their Own Words:
“We can’t have it both ways. We can’t expect God to protect us in a crisis and just leave Him over there on the shelf in our day-to-day living.” – President Ronald Reagan, 1982
