The Supreme Court declined to allow South Carolina to enforce a law requiring students to use bathrooms corresponding to his or her biological sex on Wednesday.
The 6-3, unsigned order said the request, brought forward as an emergency petition by the state, was not denied on the merits, but rather due to the standards the justices consider when deciding whether to grant a stay. South Carolina filed the request after an appeals court blocked the transgender bathroom law from going into effect.
“The denial of the application is not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation. Rather, it is based on the standards applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court,” the unsigned order said.
The order said Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the request to lift the injunction in the interim.
South Carolina Solicitor General Thomas Hydrick argued in his petition last month that the high court should stay the injunction and that the appeals court relied on a “discredited” opinion that goes against the Supreme Court’s recent rulings.
Hydrick also pointed to the high court’s decision to hear B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education in the upcoming term. The B.P.J. case will deal with whether a state law limiting female sports to biological women violates Title IX or the equal protection clause. The high court is also slated to hear a separate case on the legality of state laws limiting men’s and women’s sports by biological sex.
“An emergency stay of the Fourth Circuit’s injunction is warranted not only because Grimm was wrongly decided and should (and may soon) be overturned, but because in the absence of this Court’s immediate intervention, the State, the school district, and its students are suffering actual, ongoing, material harms, all from a mandatory injunction that disrupts the status quo in a preliminary posture in a case where the Plaintiffs are unlikely ultimately to prevail,” Hydrick wrote in his August petition to the Supreme Court.
SOUTH CAROLINA ASKS SUPREME COURT TO LIFT BLOCK ON TRANSGENDER BATHROOM LAW
The Wednesday decision came during a busy week for the high court’s emergency docket, despite the new Supreme Court term not beginning for another month.
Earlier this week, the justices ruled 6-3 to lift restrictions a federal district court placed on immigration operations in southern California.
