When a federal judge recently blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to change a key civil rights law to benefit those choosing alternative gender identity and sexual orientation lifestyles, he pointed out a key flaw in the government’s insistence that its plan move forward:
The government was misquoting, or misinterpreting, the law in the case.
Daily Caller News Foundation said recently that the Department of Education announced changes to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a landmark civil rights law banning sex discrimination in schools to benefit transgenders and others.
But U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley for the Eastern District of Tennessee temporarily blocked the proposal based on a lawsuit by 20 Republican attorneys general who charged it was unconstitutional.
They said, and the judge agreed, the DOE demand “directly interferes with and threatens plaintiff states’ ability to continue enforcing their state laws.”
That injunction now protects the states from penalties by the government.
Now Just the News is reporting the judge found the Biden administration likely is violating federal law with its executive orders and guidance that change the law and equate sex and gender identity because it failed to follow the rulemaking procedures.
The court’s ruling explained the White House and its agenda promoters wrongly invoked a Supreme Court decision in an employment discrimination fight.
The report explained, “The ruling is a major win for Republican attorneys general led by Tennessee’s Herbert Slattery, who sued the administration last summer for allegedly violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by unilaterally redefining federal law to not only prohibit male-female distinctions in school sports, restrooms and locker rooms, but also compel employers to use employees’ preferred pronouns.”
The injunction reveals that the federal agencies like the Department of Education cannot issue various “guidance” outlines, pretending it is merely advisory, and then threaten punishment for those who do not comply.
The report explained the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression previously had contested the DOE’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that claimed to be a guidance while actually changing the law on how colleges and universities dealt with sexual misconduct claims.
Just the News noted, “Atchley’s ruling could also help students, parents and school employees in legal challenges to gender identity policies that are premised, explicitly or implicitly, on federal interpretations of the word ‘sex’ and the threatened loss of funding for noncompliance.”
The issue is that activists in the Barack Obama administration, and now in the Biden administration, claim that “sex” in federal nondiscrimination statutes also protect those individuals with gender dysphoria.
Education officials under Biden simply said their “interpretation” of Title IX was that transgenders and such were now protected individuals because of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision in 2020.
But determining that a male posing as a female has the right to use women’s locker, restroom and changing facilities, infringes the rights of biological women who also are using those facilities.
That Bostock case said employers could not treat employees differently based on their sex, or gender dysphoria. But the justice specifically said the precedent was applicable no further than the Title VII employee law.
Biden’s education officials then took that decision and applied it to educational situations as well, threatening to “enforce” their new interpretation against groups that receive federal funding under Title IX.
Atchley said the agencies’ announcements about their plans to change the law outside of Congress amounted to final agency actions which could be challenged in court.
He noted the federal action threatened states’ ability to enforce their own laws, and cited Tennessee laws determining school sports participation by “the student’s sex at the time of the student’s birth.”
Atchley also noted the “guidance” plans were issued without complying with the Administrative Procedures Act.
Just the News reported, “The judge chided the feds for ignoring the explicit text of the Bostock decision even while citing it for support, noting the majority ‘explicitly refused to decide’ the issue of bathrooms, locker rooms and dress codes under Title VII.”
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