http://www.sacbee.com/2010/02/20/2551289/bill-would-overturn-mandated-search.html Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal figures 43 years is long enough to try to "cure" homosexuality.
So the Long Beach Democrat has introduced a bill that would strip a section from California's Welfare and Institutions Code mandating a search for such a cure.
Assembly Bill 2199, is just one of hundreds of bills given birth this week by lawmakers scurrying to meet a Friday deadline for introducing legislation this session.
AB 2199's targeted section, which was placed into law in 1967, 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."
It's unclear how seriously the department ever heeded the Legislature's instructions.
Department spokeswoman Nancy Kincaid said any research that did go on would have ended decades ago.
But Lowenthal thinks the edict's mere existence on the books is odious enough to warrant its demise.
"The fact this language has survived this long is pretty amazing," she said in a news release. "We need to blot it out and make it clear we're moving forward as a society, not backward."
Lowenthal's chief of staff, Will Shuck, said the section was brought to Lowenthal's attention by Equality California, the state's largest gay-rights group.
"This section of the code is deplorable," said Geoff Kors, the group's executive director, because it implies both that homosexuality is an illness and that gays are a threat to children.
Updating old laws is just one of scores of topics covered by the swarm of bills formally proposed this week.
There's a measure (AB 1956) to let state Fish and Game officials move dead animals around without a permit, if the carcasses are being used to feed wild condors.
There's a proposal (SB 1210) to tax sweetened beverages, with the revenues going to a program to fight childhood obesity.
And there are bills on milk and marijuana; personal trainers and prostitutes; horse racing and horse meat; attorneys and pest control.
One bill, by state Senate Republican leader-elect Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga, would allow courts to notify local authorities when mentally disordered sex offenders are released into communities.
A news release from Dutton's office said the bill would "give local authorities the ability to use common sense."
Topic: Bill would overturn mandated search for homosexuality cure (Read 1236 times)