The New York Times reports:
In a forceful challenge to the Obama administration’s stand on transgender rights, officials in 11 states sued the federal government on Wednesday, arguing that it had no authority to direct the nation’s public school districts to permit students to use the restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
The lawsuit, filed in a Federal District Court in North Texas, said the Obama administration had “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over common sense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”
The lawsuit came 12 days after civil rights lawyers from the Department of Education and the Justice Department formally issued what they described as “significant guidance” about how schools should accommodate transgender students to remain in compliance with federal law. Schools, the Obama administration lawyers wrote, “must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include nine states – Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin – as well as the governor of Maine, Paul R. LePage; the Arizona Department of Education; and school districts in Arizona and Texas.
I think we all knew that there would be significant pushback against this directive from the Obama administration. Even people who are otherwise open to progressive social experiments are likely to be reluctant when the experiment involves their own children. I guess we’ll see. Read the rest here, and stay tuned.
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Ian Shaw
Kudos to these states to stand up to legislative tyranny from the executive branch. Any and all potential changes to Title IX have to go through Congress, not an executive order.