Gay "Cure" Mandate Targeted in Calif.

[ccharles000]

California assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal has introduced a bill that would eliminate a 43-year-old section of state code that mandates a search for a “cure” for homosexuality.

According to The Sacramento Bee, the bill targets a section of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code placed into law in 1967 that “requires the Department of Mental Health to ‘plan, conduct and cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality, and into methods of identifying potential sex offenders.’”

While it remains unclear how seriously the department ever followed the order, a spokeswoman for the department told the Bee that any research that did occur would have ended decades ago.

Lowenthal, prompted by LGBT advocacy group Equality California, wants to make sure any trace of the code is eradicated.

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/02/22/Gay_Cure_Mandate_Targeted_in_Calif/

[Touchdown]

1. It's amazing what you can find still left on the books after so many years.

There's still laws on how to hitch your horse to the post at a saloon in Arizona.

[Q3JR4]

2. Instead of looking at old laws on the books

whenever something happens that politicians want to respond to, they just write and pass a new law. In this way you get millions of sometimes conflicting laws as well as laws that have no relevance to our current world.

And this keeps happening because everyone is too lazy to go back through the countless useless and redundant laws to address the issue. It's just easier to ignore every law before a given date and hope nobody notices.

Q3JR4.
Or so it would seem.

*******************************************************************

On a side note I remember reading about an English king that wrote his own comprehensive list of laws and in the process of making his new legal code the law of the land abolished all of the old laws on file. This greatly streamlined and simplified the legal process.

Of course we can't have any of that nowadays.

[TheWraith]

3. Or mandate that every law have a sunset date.

If a law isn't good enough that it can be renewed every 10 years without controversy, it doesn't deserve to be a law.

[Q3JR4]

5. That seems reasonable,

but then you'd have to keep an eye on all the laws that were set to expire...

Q3JR4.
Once again we're back to bookkeeping and general laziness.

[Initech]

4. I'm amazed this law exists.

:wow: