Calling SB 430 a “bill” insults the North Carolina General Assembly and the voters who sent Senators Moffit, Settle and Hanig to Raleigh. The text for their proposal to “eliminate participation trophies” in youth sports barely qualifies as a sentence and it’s curmudgeonly tone seems far more at home on an internet troll’s Twitter feed than being seriously discussed by our lawmakers. At 24 lines, SB 384, a straightforward bill to survey schools and buses for carbon monoxide monitoring needs, is almost twice as long as SB 430 despite the former being far less disruptive. This suggests the real objective of the bill has nothing to do with sportsmanship or the psychological welfare of children and everything to do with trying to secure a victory in this generation’s iteration of the “culture wars”. One can almost hear the sponsors chastising little kids about how back in the day things were different.

SB 430 also reeks of the same kind of government overreach conservatives claim to oppose yet invariably embrace when given sufficient power. Sadly, this haphazard style of legislation seems to be in vogue among the country’s Republican lawmakers as they muscle through ill conceived and poorly reasoned legislation, much of it having immediate and damaging impact on vulnerable groups of citizens. What’s more, how will Senators Moffit, Settle and Hanig decide who gets to claim victory if this sad excuse for legislation becomes law? What individual “performance achievement” is there that determines who gets to claim this as a political trophy?