2017: What’s New?

Radio Commentary, 90.7, 91.7 New Life FM, December 30, 2016 – By Sue Ella Deadwyler

Not only will Sunday be a new day, it’s the first day of a brand new year which will be escorted in with bells and whistles and world-wide celebrations. The new 2017 calendar will remind us that a new year has come and gone 2,016 times since the birth of Jesus Christ.

So, what’s new for 2017? Nobody knows the future, but if it goes according to the state constitution, the Georgia General Assembly will convene in ten days to begin a new 40-day session on the second Monday of the New Year. That’s when the new crop of senators and representatives, along with incumbents, take the oath of office to start their new two-year terms.

Twenty-eight new legislators will become part of the 180-member House of Representatives. Fourteen new legislators are Democrats and 14 are Republicans, so the make-up of the House will be 61 Democrats and 119 Republicans, meaning Republicans are one seat short of a two-thirds majority in the House. But that’s nothing new for the House.The 56-member Senate has five new members, 18 Democrats and 38 Republicans, which is a two-thirds majority for Republicans.

New bills and new resolutions will pour in during the session, but eager legislators began pre-filing new bills and re-cycling old ones on November 15, giving us a taste of what’s coming in the New Year. The new, H.B. 10 and new H.B. 11 re-open the debate about guns; and H.B. 3 adds new language to an old law against wearing a mask or hood in public.

The new H.B. 16 will be the umpteenth time they’ve tried to give three new groups civil rights status – gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity – but the new emphasis on trans-gender could create a new problem for Georgia parents. While trans-male or trans-female identities may be outwardly assumed by different clothes or mannerisms, and a permanent outward transition may be acquired by medication or surgery, their DNA won’t become new. Biological male or female DNA remains the same in the body in which it resides.

Surgical transition of male-to-female or female-to-male could create new problems for Georgians, because Georgia’s Family Planning Act authorizes minors to consent to unlimited reproductive healthcare – including surgery – without parental consent. That old Act could provide the foundation for legal action in Georgia similar to a new case in Minnesota, where the mother of a teen-age son went to court to stop the surgical removal of her son’s genitals.

Parental authority was greatly diminished in Georgia during the 1960s, when legislators passed the Family Planning Act, but did not anticipate the emergence of trans-itioning sexual identity. If parental authority were restored, 2017 could be a much happier New Year! For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.