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On the Issues
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Faith, Family & Values
For the latest developments on Senator Lieberman's work on issues relating to faith, family & values, click here.
Video Game Ratings. Senator Lieberman has a history of pursuing initiatives offering guidance to parents concerned about the range and type of media experiences children have available to them. He has worked to seek to limit the exposure of children to video games intended for adults. Early on, Senator Lieberman's concerns led him to hold the first hearings on the threat posed to children by video game violence, and he then persuaded the video game industry to develop a comprehensive rating system to help parents make informed choices for their children. Senator Lieberman subsequently persuaded a number of leading national retailers to adopt standard policies to enforce the ratings and prevent children from buying adult-rated games. The Impact of Media on Children. Senator Lieberman is the lead sponsor, along with Senators Clinton, Brownback, Durbin, Casey, Bayh, and Brown, of legislation to establish a research program on children and media within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The Children Media Research and Advancement Act, S. 948, also referred to as the CAMRA Act, will help provide parents with vital information concerning the effect of media use -- both positive and negative -- on their children. A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children spend 6 ½ hours a day with media -- more time than they spend doing anything else. Yet there are large gaps in our knowledge about what impact this is having on today's youth. A similar bill introduced by Senator Lieberman passed the Senate unanimously last year, but was not acted on by the House prior the close of the last Congress. V-Chip. Senator Lieberman was the lead Senate cosponsor of the V-chip law, which required television manufacturers to install a device allowing parents to block out violent and sexually explicit programming and exert more control over the television programs that their children watch. In addition, Senator Lieberman helped lead a campaign to persuade the television industry to adopt a content-based rating system to work in concert with the V-chip.
Child Support. Throughout his career in the Senate and his prior career as Connecticut's Attorney General, Senator Lieberman has sponsored legislation to improve child support enforcement law, to help families collect child support across state lines, to require states to deny renewing drivers' licenses for deadbeats and to include unpaid child support on credit reports. Many of these efforts eventually became part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. For information on education issues, please click here.
CARE Act. On February 7, 2002, Senator Lieberman introduced the Charity, Aid, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act with Senator Rick Santorum. The CARE Act is aimed at strengthening support for the broad range of community, civic, and philanthropic groups, including the religiously affiliated, that are strengthening our social fabric. It contains none of the troubling charitable choice provisions that were in the House bill that undermined or preempted civil rights laws and raised constitutional concerns. This legislation is a bipartisan initiative to help empower America's charities to do more good works and help more people in need. It builds on similar provisions in the President's Faith-based and Community Initiative, embracing many of the same principles and the same programs. But the CARE Act goes beyond the President's original plan, including substantial new funding for essential social service programs and the Senator's proposals for new individual development accounts for the poor (see opportunity section). The Senate passed the bill in April 2003. Lieberman and Santorum re-introduced the CARE Act in November 2005.
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Federal Resources
Bill Tracking |
Senator Lieberman has been a powerful advocate for parents who are concerned about the lessons children -- particularly pre-adolescents -- are learning from violent and sexually explicit messages they are exposed to on a daily basis through movies, music, television, video games, and the Internet. He has challenged entertainment industry leaders to act responsibly in making and marketing their products, and he has helped provide parents with the tools they need to make informed choices for their children.