Open-government groups fighting with political ethics watchdog

Good morning. Happy hump day. We start with an interesting read from the Los Angeles Times about good government groups fighting with the FPPC.

“A rare and heated dispute has erupted between California’s campaign finance regulators and open-government groups that have accused the watchdog agency of pressuring them to rescind their support for legislation designed to show who is funding political ads.

“Supporters of the bill criticized the state Fair Political Practices Commission for heavy-handed tactics that they said included pushing groups the commission has the power to investigate and fine to drop their support for the transparency bill.

“‘It’s really inappropriate for a regulator who has enormous power over organizations to call up those organizations over which they have power, and lobby them,’ said Trent Lange, president of California Clean Money Campaign. ‘It’s just inherently intimidating to have your regulator call you and ask you to do something.’

“Michele Sutter, co-founder of the group Money Out Voters In, called it ‘shocking behavior by the FPPC.'”

The Los Angeles Times has more.

In other news:

• “In addition to their six-figure salaries and benefits, California’s 120 lawmakers are compensated for their cost of living and meals when they leave home and travel to Sacramento to write and pass bills. Unlike in many other states, however, California lawmakers have over time crafted loosely worded rules for themselves that allow them to collect those payments regardless of whether they even show up to work,” reports AP/The San Jose Mercury News. 

• “Kamala Harris, in the final weeks of her U.S. Senate campaign against fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez, released a higher education plan Tuesday calling for making public colleges and universities free for students whose families earn less than $140,000 a year. She also wants to allow borrowers to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• “The retiring forecaster for California’s largest public employee pension fund offered some final advice on Tuesday: State and local governments should be required to pay more into the system as soon as next year.” The Los Angeles Times has more.

• “A prominent group advocating for LGBT rights has withdrawn its endorsement of six state Assembly members because they abstained or voted against a bill aimed at protecting gay and transgender students from discrimination at private colleges,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

   

Legislature:

• Gone ’til December. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

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Controversial language dropped from Title IX bill

Good morning and welcome to Thursday. While all eyes will be on the Legislature’s appropriations committee meetings today and the hundreds of bills they’ll be deciding the fate of, one bill found new life yesterday. 

After weeks of opposition from religious colleges and their supporters, state Sen. Ricardo Lara announced he would drop provisions from a bill that would have made it more difficult for faith-based institutions to receive Title IX exemptions.

The Bell Gardens Democrat said he wrote Senate Bill 1146 to protect LGBT students who may not be treated equally at religious colleges by putting roadblocks in the way for institutions making admission, housing and accommodation decisions based on traditional views about sexuality. 

But after pushback from religious colleges who claim the bill forces them to violate long-established standards of conduct, as well as making them vulnerable to lawsuits, Lara said SB1146 required a second look.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Around 1,341 people die annually from bad air in the Los Angeles area, making it the deadliest air in the country, according to a new study. The Orange County Register has more. 
• “Critics of Gov. Jerry Brown’s nearly $16 billion plan to bore two massive tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta won a state audit of its ongoing costs on Wednesday, though state officials don’t expect the audit to delay the project,” reports The San Jose Mercury News/AP.
• The sponsor of a bill to would extend job protection for workers on parental leave plans to revive the bill before the end of the legislative session after it died in June at the hands of West Covina Democrat Roger Hernández. “Two months prior, (the sponsor) had issued a public letter demanding that Hernández take a leave of absence from the Legislature pending resolution of spousal-abuse charges filed in April,” writes the Santa Barbara Independent.
• “Orange County supervisors have unleashed a frontal assault on the California Shield Law, which protects journalists from disclosing unpublished information and is vital to the news gathering process in our democracy,” writes Voice of OC. 

Legislature:

• The Appropriations committees in both chambers convene today to clear out hundreds of bills from the “suspense file,” the beginning of which is done in near secrecy, writes the Los Angeles Times.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @provpophealth

But the Boy Scouts aren’t the only group targeted. Any youth organization would be stripped of its tax-exempt status if the group does not open to all gender identities, races, sexual orientations, nationalities or religious affiliations.

Girl Scouts, Little League, YMCA, YWCA, Future Farmers of America, 4-H and Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs are all listed in Lara’s bill, in addition to the Boy Scouts.  Even Special Olympics, American Youth Soccer and Pop Warner football are named.

SB 323 threatens these kid-focused nonprofit organizations with being stripped of current tax exemptions if they do not embrace the state’s policies on sexual orientation and gender identity. The bill requires the state’s policies be incorporated into the organizations’ hiring, practices, membership, objectives and activities.

Critics contend that, if this bill becomes law, it will be only a matter of time before churches are faced with this same dilemma.

Many of these nonprofit organizations provide important services to their community. By stripping them of their tax-exemption, California would be harming the very people lawmakers claim to support.

Supporters of SB323 contend they are not dictating the views of a nonprofit organization, only seeking to align it with state policies.

The controversy

The Scouts long have fired any troop leader who announced his homosexuality, a decision that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. The Scouts cited Jerrold Schwartz, a 42-year-old scoutmaster of a New York scout troop, who repeatedly sodomized a young teen in his troop over the course of a three-year period during the mid-nineties.

City Journal wrote in 2002, “Ex-scoutmasters from Massachusetts and Iowa to Oklahoma and Utah have recently faced charges on such offenses. Cases of sexual abuse in the Scouts have been rising, going from 70 a year two decades ago to roughly 200 a year by the late 1990s.”

The ban still is on for troop leaders. But in May this year, the Boy Scouts of America’s National Council modified its policy for the scouts themselves, and now allows them to be of any “sexual orientation or preference.”

Last year, the California Assembly refused to commemorate the 102nd anniversary of the Boy Scouts by rejecting a bill by Assemblyman Mike Morell, R-Rancho Cucamonga.

Lara

Lara is a member of the Legislature’s LGBT Caucus. When SB323 was introduced in the Senate, he said, “They [Boy Scouts] are out of line with the values of California and should be ineligible for a tax benefit paid for by all Californians. SB323 brings our laws into line with our values.”

Lara’s own career has been in the insulated state political community. His bio lists previous jobs as “community activist,” “political aid” and “longtime Assembly staffer.” Prior to running for Assembly, Lara was  appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to the powerful Los Angeles Planning Commission. Lara worked for Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Sen. Kevin de Leon, before finally mounting his own run for Assembly.

The bill has passed the California Senate and four Assembly legislative committees, with votes along party lines. SB323 will be voted on in the Assembly this week.

If SB323 does become law, it inevitably will be challenged on First Amendment grounds as violating the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” And given that many of the groups affected are affiliated with religious organizations, the law also will be attacked for violating the First Amendment right to religious freedom.

Civil rights groups will maintain that Americans’ “values” should be determined, not by lifelong political operatives, but by the people themselves.

By Katy Grimes

As if plucked right out of the silly book, “There Oughta Be A Law,” San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has been pushing a bill through the Legislature which has the potential of turning all schools into beta test sites for social experiments.

AB 1266 would require a student to be permitted to use the male or female bathrooms and locker rooms in public schools, based on the student’s gender self-identification.

Lawmakers who support this bill claim they are protecting civil rights by creating laws for transgender persons. However, the bathroom is usually a place where there is an expectation of privacy. So the question becomes: Whose civil rights are being protected and whose are being trampled?

Sponsored by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Equality California, Transgender Law Center and Gay Straight Alliance Network, AB 1266 would also require students be allowed to participate in sports and programs as the gender with which they identify.

While the Los Angeles Unified School District and San Francisco schools have already adopted “Transgender and gender variant students, ensuring equity and nondiscrimination” policies, the LAUSD acknowledged Ammiano’s “legislation cannot anticipate every situation that might occur with respect to transgender and gender variant students.”

Is there a real need for this bill?

In the bill analysis, Ammiano said:

“AB 1266 clarifies California’s student nondiscrimination laws by specifying that all students in K-12 schools must be permitted to participate in school programs, activities, and facilities in accordance with the student’s gender identity. This bill is needed to ensure that transgender students are protected and have the same opportunities to participate and succeed as all other students.

“Although current California law already protects students from discrimination in education based on sex and gender identity, many school districts do not understand and are not presently in compliance with their obligations to treat transgender students the same as all other students in the specific areas addressed by this bill. As a result, some school districts are excluding transgender students from sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities.”

The requirement Ammiano makes of schools to treat transgender students the same as all other students is perplexing. That is exactly what most schools are doing. It’s only when parents and special interest groups sue that these issues escalate.

Washington State problems

Washington State passed such a law in 2006, and has run into a big problem.

“Parents in Washington state became outraged last year when their young daughters, who participate in their local swim club, discovered a male sitting naked in the sauna ‘displaying male genitalia,’” the Christian News Net reported last fall. However, police and school representatives of Evergreen State College alike said there wasn’t anything they could do about the situation because of state law.

The transgender “student” is 45 years old.

Child transgender cases

There is also the case of the first grade transgender girl whose parents allowed their six-year-old son to “come out” as a girl. The parents then filed a complaint with the Colorado Office of Civil Rights alleging a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination law because the elementary school didn’t allow the child to use the girls’ restroom. The school tried to accommodate the girl by allowing her to use the bathroom in the school office, but that wasn’t enough for the parents. With the help of The Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, the parents sued, and their child’s intensely personal story has been made very public.

Yet research suggests that many children gradually become “comfortable with their natal gender,” an American Psychiatric Association task force reported in 2011. But the goal of any treatment should be to help the child adjust to its reality, the APA says.

The transgender condition was added to the APA diagnosis manual in 1980. In the newest edition of the manual, the condition has been renamed Gender Dysphoria.

But many parents and students feel this very small group is being moved to the front of the civil rights line.

The Pacific Justice Institute is opposed to Ammiano’s bill, and is fighting hard to kill it. “Foremost among the bill’s many shortcomings is its complete disregard for the privacy of the vast majority of students who are not transgender or gender-questioning,” PJI said. “These students (and their parents) have reasonable expectations that they will not be forced to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite biological and anatomical gender. There are no safeguards whatsoever in the legislation that would allow responsible adults, including coaches, teachers, chaparones, school administrators and others to act in the best interests of all students.”

If AB 1266 is passed and signed into law, girls will be forced to use bathrooms, locker rooms and showers with anatomical males, and boys with anatomical females, because the transgender persons self-identify as a member of the opposite sex.

Legal issues

In the private sector, employers are required to make “reasonable accommodations” for persons of all legally protected categories. One reasonable accommodation for a transgender employee would be exactly what the school offered the Colorado first grader — allowing someone to use a private bathroom instead of the common facilities.

Protecting the privacy interests of minor students more than adults was supported in Doe vs. Clenchy, Maine Superior Court, 2012. The court ruled that a school district did not 
act discriminatorily by assigning a third grade male-to-female transgender student to use a faculty restroom rather than the female student restrooms.

Several federal and state courts have recognized the significant concerns of opposite sex entry into restrooms and other similarly sensitive, usually private facilities. In Etsitty vs. 
Utah Transit Authority, 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2007, a male-to-female transsexual was terminated by the Utah Transit Authority for entering women’s public restrooms while on the job because 
the UTA feared liability from patrons. In 
the ensuing unlawful gender discrimination suit, the 10th Circuit ruled in favor of the UTA, stating that requiring employees to use restrooms that match their biological gender is not discriminatory.

In Goins v. West Group, Minnesota Superior Court, 2001, a male-to-female transgender resigned from and then sued 
West Group after not being allowed to use the women’s restroom. The Court held that West Group’s policy of requiring employees to use the restroom assigned to their biological gender, rather than their self-image gender, was not discriminatory, stating that “the traditional and accepted practice in the employment setting is to provide restroom facilities that reflect the cultural preference for restroom designation based on biological gender.”

These legal cases support the common sense understanding that biological and anatomical gender still matter in certain intimate contexts.

Another concern is the insistence that gender should be entirely self-identified and divorced from anatomy.

The bill analysis claimed there was no fiscal component or issue with AB 1266. But if it is passed, expect to see public schools being forced to completely remodel bathrooms and locker room facilities to comply. Doing so also would deplete scarce school funds.

Ammiano’s bill establishes no standard to determine the veracity of a pupil’s claim to a particular gender identity. Without establishing any standard, the determination will be left to the pupil who may claim any gender identity at any time for any reason.

By Katy Grimes

California’s historic decline is not just limited to bad economic policy; California politicians have been meddling in people’s bedrooms, churches, women’s wombs, classrooms, kitchens, autos, bank accounts, and in the courtroom.

Social engineering

Is access to contraceptives really a problem, or one ginned up by “abortion-rights” activists?

AB 2348, would expand the scope of non-doctors to be able to prescribe or administer contraceptives. Currently limited to medical doctors, nurse practioners and specially ccertified midwives, Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, wants to add physicians assistants, and nurses to the list of those who can prescribe contraception.

Opponents are very concerned that important decisions about contraception would no longer be required to have physician supervision. Even the Association of Nurse Pracionerss and California Nurses Association were opposed to the bill.

“More than 15 years ago, when the state contraceptive mandate was being debated in the California Legislature, written materials distributed by the sponsors of the legislation likened contraceptives to vaccines, claiming that their ready availability was as important to society as vaccines that prevented disease,” the Californa  Catholic Conference wrote in its opposition to the bill.

Maybe your dental hygenist can perform your next root canal too.

It takes a village

A bill authored by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, would allow a child to have multiple parents, The Sacramento Bee reports.

Currently California law permits no more than two parents per child. Leno’s bill, SB 1476:

1. Authorizes a court to find that a child has two presumed parents if the court finds that it is in the best interests of the child based on the nature, duration, and quality of the presumed or claimed parents’ relationships with the child and the benefit or detrimentto the child in continuing those relationships;

2. Provides that a child may have a parent-child relationship, as defined by the Uniform Parentage Act, with more than two parents;

3. Requires, in the case of a child with more than two legal parents, the court to allocate custody and visitation among the parents based on the best interest of the child, including stability for the child; and

4. Requires, in the case of a child with more than two legal parents, the court to divide child support obligations among the parents based on the statewide uniform to permit recognition of more than two parents.

Under the cconcept of “new families,” Leno’s bill goes hand-in-hand with other same-sex legislation, only this one redefines the family legally. Critics say that since voters would not pass same-sex marriage, now Leno and other gay rights activists are trying another route  to their goals, but this one is through children and the courts.

Vaccines

AB 2109 by Assemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, would require all public school-age children to receive vaccinations, despite parental opposition.

The bill has received a great deal of attention since vaccinations are a medical controversy for many parents.

The bill iis currently in the Senate committee process. I wrote about it here.

Abortion

SB 1338, by Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, would have allowed nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants to provide first-trimester abortions. She scaled back her bill to include only 41 providers statewide that are involved in a UC San Francisco pilot program. But a Senate committee deadlocked on the bill, and it failed.

The bill was sponsored by Planned Parenthoood, NARAL, the California Nurses Association, and the SEIU. Most of the bill’s analysis was provided by these prro-abortion organizations. When legislative committee staff are in favor of a bill, it’s really obvious.

However, Kehoe took the language from the failed bill, and placed it in budget bill SB 623. Kehoe received much criticism for trying to cram a failed bill into a budget trailer bill without the usual  committee hearings, public notification or debate. SB 623 was just passed the Assembly Health Committee, 13-6.

Sexual Orientation

SB 1172, titled, “Sexual orientation change efforts,” by Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance,  would prevent parents from seeking therapy for children who show confusion about their sexual orientation.  Prior to five ammendments, the original bill would have stopped any attempt at reparative therapy, for both adults and minors.

But because of the  universal opposition by all mental health professional organizations, the bill has been significantly amended.  It has passed both houses of the Legislature, and awaits the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown.

AB 2356, by Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, same-sex female couples using a known sperm donor would have the same access to fertility services as heterosexual women seeking to conceive using a male partner.

Traditional infertility issues arise when a couple attempting to get pregnant has not succeeded within six months. However, this legal definition of “infertile couple” does not apply to same-sex female couples who want to be able to access fertility clinics as well.

According to testimony in the Assembly Health Committee July 3, “Under current law, a woman could try to conceive a child via artificial insemination using “fresh” sperm — sperm that has not been frozen, tested for disease and quarantined — from a male donor with whom she has been “sexually intimate.” The current language is interpreted by fertility doctors fearing liability to mean that heterosexual women having sexual intercourse with their male partner are candidates for fresh sperm insemination, but same-sex female couples, and single women, with a fresh sperm donor they haven’t had intercourse with, are not, meaning the have to seek out more expensive artificial conception procedures.”

The bill also would allow women to the artificial insemination process without the rigorous disease screenings currently required.

Supporrt for AB 2356 primarily came from groups touting LGBT couples’ fertility rights.

Marriage

SB 1140,  by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, appears to be redefining marriage, and even creating new types of legal marriages.

The bill would stipulate “that marriage is a personal relation arising out of a civil, and not religious, contract” and affirms that no clergyman would be required to perform a marriage that conflicts with his beliefs.  Opponents of SB 1140  pointed out that the bill appears to introduce an inappropriate and perhaps even unconstitutional definition of marriage, and that clergy already have religious liberty guarantees in both the state and the federal constitutions.

Leno has introduced this same bill four previous times.

Foster parenting

AB 1856, by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, would require potential foster parents to be trained for cultural sensitivity toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. The bill is  sponsored by Equity California, a political gay-rights advocacy and lobbying organization.

Opponents to the bill argued that all children should be treated with dignity and respect, and that foster parents who take children from various cultures and races are not required to show specific cultural competency training for their particular background.  AB 1856 passed the Assembly in May, and currently is being heard in Senate committees.

There is a special interest theme taking place by Democrats, and in California’s LGBT legislative caucus. The theme is one in which an inordinate amount of legislative time is being spent. In addition, the many bills seeking to replace parental rights continue to advance in California. Put them together and it is obvious there is a huge shift toward legislating social outcomes, despite the will of the people.

And even without the will of the people behind these social causes, whose rights are really being trampled? California’s children and young people have become political pawns, however, Democrats first need to get parents out of the way.