When
Supreme Court
justices create new rights out of thin air, as Justice Neil Gorsuch did in expanding the 1964 Civil Rights Act to cover
sexual orientation and gender identity
in Bostock v. Clayton County, unintended consequences are a certainty.
Just two years later, Gorsuch’s dissembling opinion is bearing foul fruit. The Department of
Agriculture
has cited Bostock as the reason it will now be starving students if they attend schools that don’t hew to the LGBT agenda.
Specifically, the USDA
announced
last month that “consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County,” all state and local agencies that receive funds from the Food and Nutrition Service — this includes food stamps and the school lunch program — must now “update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based in gender and sexual orientation.”
And just how should these “non-discrimination policies” be updated to include gender identity and sexual orientation? President Joe Biden’s Education Department has not yet released its proposed regulation governing school compliance with gender identity nondiscrimination procedures, but former President Barack Obama’s Education Department released a
guidance letter
in 2016 that will assuredly serve as a baseline.
That guidance would have forced all preschools, K-12 schools, and colleges and universities that receive federal funding to accept and, in effect, preach the fiction that gender is merely a social construct, totally separable from biological sex.
Practically, schools receiving USDA money would have to open up all restrooms and locker rooms to any student who wanted to use them regardless of their biological sex. Girls who do not want to be in the presence of naked male genitalia while they change for PE or extracurricular sports would lose all privacy.
The guidance also would have forced teachers to use the preferred pronouns of students, also regardless of their biological sex. This would be compelled speech that violates the religious beliefs of those who believe, along with 99% of all sentient humans throughout history, that girls are born girls and boys are born boys.
Perhaps most alarmingly, the guidance would also have required that teachers not tell parents about their children’s gender identity or sexual orientation unless the child gave them their specific permission to do so. Again, this guidance applied to all preschools and K-12 schools. Parents have a right to know what their children are doing and saying in school.
Threatening to cut off federal lunch funding to schools that don’t enact the latest wish list from LGBT activists is an absurd result stemming from an absurd decision by Gorsuch. Luckily, Republican governors such as Florida’s
Ron DeSantis
and South Dakota’s
Kristi Noem
have pledged to do everything in their power to fight Biden’s USDA and Department of Education on transgender issues.
These fights will undoubtedly end up in federal court, and perhaps one of them will make it all the way to the Supreme Court, where Gorsuch would then have an opportunity to correct his mistake.
