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For those following H 88: Health Youth Act - aka the sex ed bill - it was heard in the Senate Mental Health & Youth Services Committee today.

However, there was no vote. The bill will, in theory, get another hearing in the coming weeks.

For those who haven't been following the legislation, the bill would create two tracks of sex education for kids in public school. One would be the existing "abstinence only" curriculum, which actually talks about sex a bit but does so in the context of waiting until marriage.

The new "comprehensive" curriculum would be a bit more aggressive in imparting information about how one avoids unwanted pregnancies and diseases. (My understanding is that the biggest difference is in the tone of how the information is presented, although kids in the comprehensive course would get an extra day or two of learning on the topic.)

Click here for the staff summary of the bill.

{{Because the committee hearing was in a room that isn't streamed on the internet and there's a great deal of interest in this bill, I dropped a mike in the room today. The sound is a bit all over the place because the mike was at the podium and people spokes from a variety of positions. You'll hear the committee chairmen real clearly. You may need to crank up the sound to hear other people asking and answering questions.

Click here to listen to my tape.}}

Co-chairmen Malcom Graham and Ellie Kinnaird said they wanted to give time for members of the committee to have questions answered.

"We feel we owe it to our members to get those questions answered," Kinnaird said. "It's a bill that's going to be a major change to some people in this state."

I'm a little bit skeptical of that explanation. It seemed as if the decision to delay the vote was made on the fly after a couple members left and came back into the room to confer with someone in the hall outside the committee room. One definitely got the sense that word had come down from elsewhere to delay the committee vote.

At any rate - most of the questions that were asked came from Sens. Jim Jacumin and Jim Forrester, Republicans who questioned the need for the bill.

Forrester argued the state's teen pregnancy rates had dropped over the past decades with the abstinence only curriculum in place.

"Apparently they're doing a good job," he said.

That's true said Rep. Susan Fisher, one of the bill's sponsors. However, North Carolina is still ninth in the nation in teen pregnancy rates and rates of STDs are on the rise, she said.

"Evidently, it is not working," Fisher said.

(Worth noting: this is one of two bills Republican leaders have taken aim at.)

Again, click here to listen to all the doings from today's hearing yourself.