I’ve changed my stance on this bill and you can see my new arguments in this post – HB0558 UNCONSTITUTIONAL!

While HB0558 is not unconstitutional on its own, the whole health department and the educational system are in fact unconstitutional. However we cannot address that at this time and instead have to try to regain our constitutional freedoms using the bills that are presented before us today.

That brings up HB0558 which is a bill requiring the county BOE’s to develop a new health curriculum in their educational curriculum. The bill allows for the parents to opt out of only certain topics of the curriculum. There are many issues with this.

• BOE’s tend to hide the sexual content in other areas that can’t be opted out of. We saw this in Montgomery County last year. Unfortunately the law suit stating the religious rights of the parents were being violated was poorly presented and as far as I know they lost the law suit.
• Legally any strongly held belief can be considered a religion. That being the case, we the religious freedom fighters can claim that the state is pushing their own religion on us using this curriculum, making this whole bill unconstitutional.
• Because each person’s choice of healing can also be considered their own strongly held belief and therefore part of their religion, the option to opt out of the whole curriculum should be provided.

I cover all these points in my written testimony below. Please read it. You may copy and paste all or any part of it that you choose. We as a community have failed to exercise our freedom of religion properly. I believe it is time that we change that. Let them have their agenda by allowing the bill to be passed. But only allow it to be passed with the option for the parent/guardian to opt out of the whole stinking ungodly thing!

(Note: I don’t know why my document has the whole body of the text gray highlighted. Using an old version of Word, so just not sure what is going on with that. Contact me if you have a solution!)