This Week Inside the Capitol June 14, 2010
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride
by Rebecca Burgoyne, CFC Research Analyst June 14, 2010
As attorneys in San Francisco prepare for the final lap in U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s Prop 8 courtroom on Wednesday, legislators in Sacramento prepared to honor homosexual activists on the Assembly floor this morning. Following the proclamation of June as LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) Pride Month, the legislative LGBT Caucus planned to host an awards ceremony on the Assembly floor honoring homosexual leaders, including author Armistead Maupin, law professor David Cruz, and marriage activist Del Martin.
Meanwhile, legislators and their staff prepare for a month of hearings on bills that have graduated from one chamber to the other. SB 906 (Leno, D-San Francisco), which would create a new class of marriage – “civil” marriage – will be heard on June 29 in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. Despite the people’s vote on Proposition 8, legislators intent on promoting same-sex marriage and deconstructing the historic institution could use SB 906 as an incremental step in redefining what marriage is.
Stating the obvious, legislators are not expected to make tomorrow’s deadline for passing the 2010-11 fiscal year budget.
Legislation Currently Tracked by CFC
Senate
SB 203 (Harmon, R-Costa Mesa) – Current law criminalizes the distribution of obscene matter and child pornography. SB 203 would add the making of materials available for access or possession over the Internet to the definition of distribution. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 22
SB 543 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would allow minors to seek mental health treatment without parental knowledge or consent. OPPOSE
Assembly floor (inactive file)
SB 677 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – would allow for the property seizure of those convicted of human trafficking. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 15
SB 834 (Florez, D-Bakersfield) – would allow a court to prohibit communication between a convicted sex offender and a minor victim. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 22
SB 840 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – Current law requires an observer of a murder, rape, or certain other serious crimes, accompanied by force – where the victim is under 14 – to report the observed crime to the police. SB 840 expands this to where the victim is under the age of 18. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 15
SB 906 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would create a new class of marriage – “civil” marriage, likely an incremental precursor to redefining what marriage is. OPPOSE
Assembly Judiciary Committee June 29
SB 962 (Liu, D-Glendale) – would allow incarcerated parents – who have waived their right to attend the hearing terminating their parental rights – to view the hearing via videoconferencing.
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 15
SB 1064 (Alquist, D-San Jose) – would make changes, including requiring the creation of a succession plan, to the stem-cell agency created by voters with Proposition 71 in 2004.
Assembly Health Committee June 22
SB 1204 (Runner, R-Lancaster) – would prevent convicted sex offenders from opening accounts with – or participating on – any social networking sites, and would require them to report their e-mail addresses, online addresses, and instant-messaging aliases to law enforcement. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 22
SB 1253 (Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks) – would prohibit a paroled sex offender from living within half a mile from a minor victim – unless the victim is a member of the parolee’s household. SUPPORT
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 15
SB 1279 (Pavley, D-Santa Monica) – would authorize a pilot program to help commercially sexually exploited minors in Los Angeles County, identical to a program currently operating in Alameda County.
Assembly Public Safety Committee June 15
SB 1285 (Steinberg, D-Sacramento) – would expand punitive damages in cases of human trafficking.
Assembly Judiciary Committee
SB 1300 (Correa, D-Santa Ana) – Pupils: Teen Dating Violence Prevention, would authorize a school district to provide teen dating violence-prevention education as part of the sexual health and health education program it provides to grades 7 to 12.
Assembly Education Committee June 30
SB 1317 (Leno, D-San Francisco) – would hold a parent criminally responsible for the chronic truancy of a child over six years of age in grades 1-8. Misdemeanor crime could be punishable by a fine up to $2,000, one-year imprisonment, or both. OPPOSE
Assembly Public Safety Committee
SB 1361 (Corbett, D-San Leandro) – would prohibit social networking sites from displaying the home address or phone number of a minor.
Assembly Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media Committee
SB 1451 (Yee, D-San Francisco) – requires the California State Board of Education to review proposed textbooks for content deemed to result from Texas’ recent action – and to insure that the materials satisfy guidelines in current California law. The bill would also require the board to keep the Secretary of Education, and the chairmen of both the Senate and Assembly education policy committees informed of this information.
Assembly Education Committee June 16
SCR 76 (Corbett, D-San Leandro) – would proclaim the Legislature’s support of human-trafficking awareness events and encourage Californians to become aware of the problem of human trafficking and work to eradicate the criminal practice. SUPPORT
Senate Rules Committee
SJR 28 (Kehoe, D-San Diego) – would urge the Congress and the President of the United States to enact legislation to have the 2020 Census gather data on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Senate Judiciary Committee June 15
Assembly
AB 33 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 33 would require the Violent Crime Information Center (within the Department of Justice) to release a list of registered sex offenders in the proximity within two hours of a child reportedly abducted by a stranger.
Senate Public Safety Committee June 22
AB 34 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 34 would require the release of certain information to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to assist in the search for the missing person or persons. If the missing person is under age 21 – and there is evidence the person is at risk – within two hours the law enforcement agency will send the report to the Department of Justice for inclusion in the Violent Crime Information Center and the National Crime Information Center databases.
Senate Public Safety Committee June 22
AB 52 (Portantino, D-Pasadena) – would require the state Department of Public Health to establish the Umbilical Cord Blood Collection Program to collect and store blood for public use, transplantation, and specified research. SUPPORT
Senate Health Committee June 23
AB 1022 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara) – part of a package of bills to enable quicker law enforcement response time in the event of reported missing children, AB 1022 would establish a task force at the Department of Justice to help law enforcement agencies with the search and recovery of at-risk abducted children, and maintaining up-to-date knowledge and expertise of the best methods and technologies to recover missing children.
Senate Public Safety Committee June 22
AB 1841 (Buchanan, D-San Ramon) – would conform California law with federal law, which prohibits a public agency from continuing to provide special education or related services to a child whose parents or guardian have withdrawn their consent in writing. SUPPORT
Senate Education Committee June 16
AB 1844 (Fletcher, R-San Diego) – known as Chelsea’s Law, this bill would provide increased potential punishments for sexual crimes when the victim is under 14 years old.
Senate Public Safety Committee
AB 2015 (Arambula, I-Fresno) – Current law requires the creation of multidisciplinary personnel teams to assist and monitor families who are potential child abusers. By allowing these teams to track potential abusers via computer databases, AB 2085 may ultimately permit the government regular access into families’ lives, even if there has been no abuse.
Assembly Human Services Committee
AB 2034 (Knight, R-Palmdale) – would prevent persons convicted of sex or substance offenses from volunteering at school activities. SUPPORT
Senate Education Committee June 16
AB 2199 (Lowenthal, D-Long Beach) – would delete state code sections that require research into the causes and cures of homosexual behavior.
Senate Health Committee June 23
AB 2380 (Lowenthal, D-Long Beach) – would allow unsubstantiated second-party statements as reasonable evidence for child-abuse accusations, opening the door to possible intrusion into the lives of innocent families. OPPOSE
Senate Public Safety Committee June 16
AB 2412 (Tran, R-Costa Mesa) – would designate February 6 of each year as Ronald Reagan Day, and would encourage public schools and educational institutions to engage in exercises remembering the life of Ronald Reagan.
Senate Education Committee
AB 2416 (Cook, R-Yucaipa) – Current law provides that a party's absence, relocation, or failure to comply with custody and visitation orders is not, by itself, sufficient to justify modification of a custody or visitation order if the failure is due to activation to military service and deployment out of state. AB 2416 would expand this provision to cover additional military-related deployments. SUPPORT
Passed Senate Judiciary Committee 5-0
Senate floor
AB 2426 (Bradford, D-Inglewood) – would define and regulate “surrogacy facilitators,” and require non-attorney surrogacy facilitators to direct clients to deposit client faith funds into an independent, bonded escrow account or a trust account maintained by an attorney.
Senate Judiciary Committee June 22
AB 2444 (Furutani, D-Long Beach) – would require that – if a district has an enrolled student, per a transfer agreement between two districts – the student may remain in the outside district without having to annually re-obtain waiver approval.
Senate Education Committee June 23
AB 2700 – (Ma, D-San Francisco) enables domestic partners who have married each other to dissolve both their marriage and their partnership in a single proceeding.
Senate Judiciary Committee June 22
ACR 74 (Portantino, D-Pasadena) – expresses the Legislature’s desire to find ways to help the state gain a viable public umbilical cord blood banking system to ensure that all races and ethnicities have an equal probability of finding a match when medically necessary. SUPPORT
Senate Health Committee June 16
AJR 15 (DeLeon, D-Los Angeles) – encourages the federal government to pass legislation to treat same-sex couples by the same immigration standards as married couples. OPPOSE
Passed Senate Judiciary Committee 3-2
Senate floor
AJR 19 (Brownley, D-Woodland Hills) – urges Congress and the President to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). OPPOSE
Senate Judiciary Committee June 15, 2010
updated 6/12/10
