The Patriot Post® · Biden's New Weapon to Intimidate Schools
While the rest of America is racing to stop the transgender agenda, the Biden administration is on another planet – one where the end of males and females is the only thing that matters. On one hand, the chair he appointed to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is praising the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision for trying to redefine the word “sex” – and on the other, his Department of Education is going around the backs of the American people to force schools to eliminate girls’ sports. Talk about selective hearing!
But then, five months into the Biden administration, most observers would agree that this president doesn’t care what Americans think – or what the law says. This White House is on a mission to abolish gender norms, and they’ll stop at nothing to make it happen. The president’s latest stunt, making “interpretation changes” to Title IX, is actually an enormous end-run around the regular rule-making process. Like other Biden agencies, where his radical armies have just issued a press release that they were overhauling established policies, the Education Department wants people to believe that it’s just putting its own spin on Title IX. The reality, though, is that the president’s “spin” is actually a profound and radical makeover – one that would give the government a new weapon to intimidate schools into dropping their fight for girls’ sports: taxpayer dollars.
Right now, almost 30 states have introduced bills that would stop our daughters from having to compete against biological boys. In the last handful of months, a wave of them – Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee – have made their legislation law. (Louisiana is on deck to be next, now that its legislature has sent a veto-proof bill to the Democratic governor’s desk.) Desperate to stop the momentum, Biden wants to force states into swallowing his transgender sports policy by telling them they’ll lose federal dollars if they don’t.
If that scares people, it shouldn’t. What most Americans don’t realize is that about 83 cents of every dollar spent on education comes from state and local sources. Another eight or nine percent comes from private entities. When all is said and done, the federal Education Department is only contributing about eight percent to the local school budgets. That’s not much in the grand scheme of things. And it’s certainly a chunk that states with convictions could make up in other ways or even cut from the bloated educational systems if they wanted to.
Obviously, the Biden administration is trying to run one of President Obama’s old plays – ordering schools to comply with mandates that hurt vulnerable children, using federal funding as the bait. From school bathrooms to school sports, the former vice president wants to follow his old boss’s lead, starting with steamrolling districts with transgender radicalism that ignores science, reason, morality, safety, and common sense.
Unfortunately for Biden, though, times have changed. People around the country have wised up and realized that Washington can’t bully them around – and they won’t tolerate it when it tries. The federal government can’t dictate what happens in our classrooms just by dangling a few pieces of silver in front of our states. We, as parents, should be determining what happens in our local community – not Leftist bureaucrats in Washington whose agenda is to indoctrinate, not educate the children of America.
The founding fathers made it clear in the Constitution that the oversight of schools is the responsibility of individual states. They’re the ones, guided by the parents, that are best equipped to recognize the local needs of the students – and in this case, they’re the ones that should serve as the check to an out-of-control and out-of-touch government.
If you’re sick of the Biden administration trying to bulldoze sports – and a majority of you are – let them know it. Join FRC in objecting to this stealth attempt to rewrite Title IX! Send your comment to the Department of Education and register your complaints. We’ve even drafted sample text to make it as easy as possible. Click over to our action campaign and tell the administration to respect parents’ rights and protect innocent school children.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.