On Tuesday, the North Carolina General Assembly overrode Governor Josh Stein's veto of HB 805.
Mitch Prosser, vice president of North Carolina Family Policy Council, talked to AFN about what this means.
"It does a lot of great things to ensure that families win here in the state of North Carolina," Prosser states.
The law started as a bill to prevent the unlawful publishing of pornographic content on the Internet, and also contains provisions that will:
-- define "male" and "female" based on biological sex in state statute, administrative rules, and state regulations.
-- prohibit the use of state taxpayer funds to pay for puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, or surgical gender transition procedures for prisoners incarcerated in the state prison system.
-- extend the statute of limitations to ten years for a malpractice action arising out of injury associated with a gender transition procedure.
-- direct local boards of education to adopt policies to allow a student or the student's parent to request that the student be excused from classroom activities or instruction that would impose a substantial burden on the student's religious belief.
-- direct local boards of education to adopt policies to provide online access to a catalog of all library books available at a school, and to allow parents the opportunity to prohibit their child from borrowing any books from the library that the parent's deem objectionable.
When Stein vetoed the measure in early July, he said he did so based on mean-spirited legislation. With the bill recognizing only two sexes, he claims that it targets the transgender community.
"My faith teaches me that we are all children of God, no matter our differences, and that it is wrong to target vulnerable people, as this legislation does," Stein said in his veto message. "I stand ready to work with this legislature when it gets serious about protecting people, instead of mean-spirited attempts to further divide us by marginalizing vulnerable North Carolinians."
When asked for comment, Prosser said he appreciates the governor's faith and "would never speak against that in any way" shape or form. Prosser then mentioned how this bill or law helps families in North Carolina thrive.
"It gives parents the ability to know what's being taught in their schools. It gives all families and government agencies, for that matter, in the state of North Carolina the ability to understand what God placed deep inside of us, and that is that He created male and female," says Prosser.
He continues to say that God created male and female in His image.
"Those are the kinds of things in the bill along with the original intent, which was to make sure that all people's images are protected from the harms of the pornography industry and to make sure that their images aren't out there on the Internet for anyone to see when they certainly didn't consent to that," Prosser concludes.
