Suzanne Bowdey | The Washington Stand
While Education Secretary Miguel Cardona took his turn in the House hot seat over Title IX, states were busy making life a misery for White House attorneys. Adding to Joe Biden’s headaches, another two governors are daring the administration to come after them after publicly flouting his rule to let boys into girls’ bathrooms, locker and dorm rooms, and on sports teams. “Protecting our kids and women’s athletics is my duty,” Cornhusker leader Jim Pillen (R) insisted late last week. “Nebraska will not comply.” And they aren’t the only ones.
The swell of angry states also includes Arkansas, whose governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), flanked by outspoken advocates Riley Gaines and Allie Beth Stuckey, formally ordered the state to disregard Biden’s radical rewrite of the law. “If President Biden threatens our state with loss of educational funding because we refuse to go along with his election-year pandering, Arkansas will take the federal government to court,” Sanders warned.
Biden’s lawyers will already be there, thanks to a deluge of lawsuits against the changes. Just this week, seven more states joined the 14 already suing over the president’s decision to unilaterally destroy 52 years of women’s rights. Led by Missouri and Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota piled on the nationwide movement to stop the White House’s incredible overreach.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R), who’s been a persistent thorn in the Left’s side, insisted, “Joe Biden is once again exceeding his constitutional authority — [putting] a radical transgender ideology ahead of the safety of women and girls. As the father of a young daughter, I take this personally,” he wanted people to know. “The Biden administration has threatened to hold federal funding hostage from any institution who rejects this unconstitutional and sexist rule.”
Although the president’s team refused to comment on the swarm of legal challenges, they did have the audacity to threaten the states lined up against them. “As a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations and we look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience,” a Biden spokesman said.
They have to rely on threats, since, as Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) pointed out on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” they don’t have a constitutional leg to stand on. Congress hasn’t changed the definition of “sex” in federal law, and Biden never had the power to.
“He’s obviously ignoring his duty to uphold the original intent of the Title IX rule, which was to give our girls and women opportunities in athletics and education opportunities for scholarships, and also to protect our girls from discrimination,” the Illinois mom said. “And he kept going back to how he’s all about protecting everybody,” she said of the tense House hearing. “And I kept pointing out to him that he is choosing to protect the boys, and he’s putting our girls at risk.”
This is somehow clear to 80% of America, but not to the man leading it. Coach Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has been disgusted watching the parents in the president’s party throw their daughters under the bus. In conversations with the 10-12 Democratic senators who’ve “consistently” voted against women, the Alabaman says he’s asked them, “Do you have daughters? Do you really believe this?” “They don’t have an answer,” he shook his head. “So you know they don’t believe it.”
But the truly terrifying thing, Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon warned on the “Outstanding” podcast, is that she’s read those 450-plus pages of Biden’s new Title IX, and “it’s pretty clear that they don’t think they’ve gone far enough with this rule. … There’s so much to be troubled about. But it could always be worse. And I think that if they have their way, it certainly will be.”
Doreen Denny, who’s been another bright light for conservatives in the debate, agreed. “I think we have to just go back to the basic foundation of what this law was supposed to be,” she said on the same episode, which was protection on the basis of sex. “And we know that sex is male and female; we’re created biologically male and female. That’s a command. And it plays out in nature. There isn’t any confusion there.” But what the Department of Education is doing, she continued, “is completely confusing what we’re supposed to understand about fundamental civil rights on immutable characteristics.”
And because of this chaos, Denny pointed out, “schools are not going to be able to understand what their jobs are even supposed to be in education anymore — because now we’ve just prioritized this walking on eggshells approach to harassment [on] school grounds. That could be anything from calling somebody [their] real name [or pronoun] … or even just trying to enforce the basic, fundamental reality of our sex-based differences, which are so important in education — whether it’s physical education, health education, our athletics, our bathrooms, our locker rooms, all down the line — that now is up for grabs. … Otherwise schools will be charged as having a ‘hostile environment.’”
Here’s an example that will make parents’ blood boil. “If our daughter is naked in a locker room, and she sees a male-bodied person in the locker room and says, ‘Hey, you’re a guy, get out of here,” she’s causing ‘de minimis’ harm to that man, and she will be the one who is prosecuted under these new Title IX rules — not him for being in the women’s bathroom or locker room.”
FRC’s Joseph Backholm, host of the podcast and a dad of girls, explained, “That is a radical inversion of the way that America has understood [freedom]. When our Constitution was originally created, nobody had the sense that people had the right to never have their feelings hurt, to never be psychologically challenged, to never have somebody ask them an uncomfortable question. The First Amendment, in fact, was written to guarantee the right of people to say and do things that would bother other people, because otherwise, there’s no reason to need to guarantee the right to free expression, to freedom of association, to the free exercise of religion — because the only time anybody would want to constrain those rights is because you’re doing something that the government is bothered by, and they wanted to make sure that individuals had the right to do those things, despite the fact that they were bothersome to other people in the community.”
That’s what it meant to be free. “We now have a presidential administration,” Joseph went on, that’s saying, “Every man who believes he’s a woman has a legal right to never be emotionally challenged [or] made uncomfortable?”
Almost worse, Backholm pointed out later, we’re teaching young girls “to ignore their built-in defense mechanisms. Because you’re telling 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds who are in a locker room that if you feel really uncomfortable because there’s a guy undressing next to you, that’s bigotry. And you need to learn to ignore that — those feelings, that discomfort — and you need to train yourself out of that so you can be in situations that instinctively are very uncomfortable without doing anything about it. Without showing it. Without saying anything. Without expressing the way you feel. And what are you creating?”
That’s horrifying, he said. “You’re just creating an environment where you are ripe to be a target for abuse because your God-given self defense mechanisms have been trained out of you by people who have told you those feelings are hatred and bigotry and discrimination. … I just want people to understand [that this is] grooming. And I don’t think it’s purposeful grooming by most people, for sure. But that is the psychological impact of what we’re doing on girls now.”
And if states don’t go along with this outrageous agenda — this war on parents and truth and innocence — the federal government is coming with a sword to force compliance. “They’re going to risk their federal funding,” Meg warned, but that’s not all they stand to lose. “It’s also the expense of the investigation that will transpire if they don’t adopt the model policy…”
Then, Doreen chimed in, they’re going to require that schools are equipped with “these Title IX ‘coordinators’ who are going to investigate any concern or anything you see that could remotely be ‘potential hostility.’”
But that’s why the states banding together in a united front around the country is so important. “[They] could hold this rule back from taking effect,” she acknowledged. “There’s also the possibility of Congress in their overview [capacity] to basically reject this rule and say that it’s illegitimate.” Maybe not under this Congress, she conceded. “But, you know, elections have consequences, and that’s why November matters.”
In the meantime, Denny urged, Americans needs to “encourage the women and girls who are speaking out and objecting to this. We need to give them platforms to make their objections known. We need to have their backs. We need to echo their messages. We need to let them know that we support them and that we agree with them. And we need to pray for them — for their continued fortitude and courage.” Because if this is allowed to stand, “when girls do speak out against this, they’re going to be disciplined.”
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON STAND
