Chris Lange, FISM News
Twenty state attorneys general are suing the Biden administration over a new directive designed to strongarm schools into establishing LGBTQ+ rights or risk losing federal funds that could end school meal programs.
Under the new directive, both public and private schools in the U.S. that receive federal funds must allow students to use spaces that correspond to their preferred gender, including bathrooms and locker rooms, or risk having needed federal money pulled. The policy also requires schools to allow students to participate in sports programs according to the gender with which they identify. School administrators and other personnel must also enforce the use of students’ “preferred pronouns” under the policy established under the Biden administration’s progressive new interpretation of Title IX anti-discrimination law.
In the lawsuit filed this week, the attorneys general challenge the policy and accuse the Biden administration of enacting “directives and rules that misconstrue the law and impose unlawful requirements” on their respective states.
The AGs argue that the Biden administration wrongfully expanded a 2020 Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia which, under federal employment law, includes sexual orientation and gender identity under the label of sex discrimination. The administration reinterpreted the law in 2021, expanding it to include Title IX and education.
“The federal court made really clear that the Biden administration had taken Bostock too far,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Attorney Christiana Kiefer, according to the report.
The temporary reprieve allows the 20 plaintiff states to limit locker rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams to biological gender for now. All other U.S. states must comply with the directive in order to receive federal funds.
The complaint asserts that, while the plaintiffs “do not deny benefits based on a household member’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” they take issue with “the unlawful and unnecessary new obligations and liabilities” imposed by the policy, “obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns.”
The federal government provides billions of taxpayer dollars each year to K-12 schools and universities in the U.S., a portion of which funds vital school meal programs.
More than 30 million children in low-income households rely on school-provided meals to meet their nutritional needs, according to a 2020 NPR report. Among the plaintiff states, 15,478,511 children are fed through school meal programs.
The states represented in the suit are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.