Profile: Mario Biaggi
The Congressman Who’s
Fighting For Grandparents
by Kathryn
Urick
Published
Vital Connections
The Newsletter of the
Foundation for Grandparenting
The Elder Teller
This profile has no borrowed statements. It speaks for itself and for Mario Biaggi. Excerpted from the Winter issue of Vital Connections’ newsletter, is surpasses any resource I could find on my favorite subject – Intergenerational Sharing. Can you imaging how excited I was to learn that the subject is also one of the favorites of Congressman Biaggi? The news made my day!
“The handsome, silver-haired man behind the desk is going through dozens of phone messages. Grandfather six times over, a Democratic Congressman from NYC for 17 years, he has spent the past five years holding hearings and introducing bills to insure that grandparents and grandchildren are not permanently separated from each other.
“Age 69, Biaggi is a former NYC police officer, Chrm. of House Select Committee on Aging’s sub-committee on Human Services since ’77. The issue of grandparent visitation rights is one of this Congressman’s main concerns.
“Biaggi believes in the importance of the GP/GC bond and says: ‘Grandparents live a fuller and better life when they are close to their grand-children. They see the child as an extension of themselves, and so give freely.’ He discovered the problem wasn’t local but national in scope.
“He considers unwarranted denial of visitation between GP/GC to be a form of intergenerational abuse that government and the legal community must combat. And, Mario Biaggi says, ‘I WILL CONTINUE TO FIGHT FOR THESE RIGHTS AS LONG AS IT IS NECESSARY.’”
Watch for a continuation in E.T. next month.