One of Student Senate’s latest bills is raising eyebrows this week after a conversation between several senators at the Maryland Campout prompted the creation of “The Birth Control Act.”
The agenda for the Senate’s Wednesday meeting still included the bill, marked for first reading, until about 10:30 p.m. last night when it was pulled by Student Senate President Forrest Hinton.
The resolution, to be entitled “an act to show appreciation towards Scott Stephenson for showing people that Orthotricyclin does have a 0.1 percent failure rate,” was meant to be a joke between lifelong education Sen. Scott Stephenson and several other senators, according to bill sponsor Sen. Adam Whitehouse.
Stephenson, who has a five-year-old daughter, was praised in the bill for representing the 0.1 percent failure rate of birth control and “us[ing] this illegitimate child to disprove natural selection because if this theory were true Scott Stephenson would never be able to reproduce.”
But Whitehouse maintained the bill was all in jest.
“It was just a joke that me and Scott and Forrest talked about,” Whitehouse said. “I didn’t really expect it to cause that much uproar.”
Stephenson echoed the sentiment.
“This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in years,” Stephenson said, claiming the joke followed “a stupid discussion between guys.”
Whitehouse said he received several e-mails regarding the bill, and pledged in an earlier conversation with Technician at about 10 p.m. to withdraw the bill early in the Senate’s next meeting.
“Our time is best spent on students — I do not want to take away from that,” Whitehouse said.
According to Hinton, Whitehouse made his “first formal request” to remove the bill from the agenda prior to the Senate’s meeting at about 10:30 p.m.
Although Hinton said Whitehouse’s conversation with Technician “possibly could have been a motivating factor” for the early removal of the bill, Whitehouse denied that the conversation had anything to do with the alteration to the agenda.
He said in a later interview around 11 p.m. that he had asked to remove the bill earlier in the day and was checking the Senate’s rules to see if this was possible.
“I actually didn’t know the final rules — that you could [remove the bill] beforehand,” Whitehouse said. “I didn’t want anyone to spend time on it since it didn’t matter.”
Whitehouse had also sent an apology through the Student Government listserv earlier in the day, pointing out the bill was “never intended to be offensive or insulting to anyone.”
He said he hoped the campus community would see the bill for what it was meant to be.
“I would hope they look at it at face value, like it should be taken — just as a joke,” Whitehouse said.
Although he said he was in no way offended by the bill, Stephenson said he wasn’t sure if it was an appropriate use of the Senate’s time.
“While I do think it’s funny, it’s not a good use of resources,” Stephenson said.
Whitehouse said he logs about 10 to 15 hours a week as chair of the Campus Community Committee of the Senate and said he felt it would be OK to “take five minutes to do that joke.”
“There are probably a lot of things that are inadequate uses of senators’ time,” Hinton said.
Hinton said he had no comment as to whether this bill was worth senators’ time.
More than anything else, Stephenson said the bill simply shows a different side of the student senators.
“It shows that senators are normal people too and they do stupid things just as well,” Stephenson said.