‘This president is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by elected representatives’
Bob Unruh
WND.com
In a major blow to the Obama administration’s alternative-sexual-behaviors agenda, a federal judge in Texas late Sunday night blocked the president’s order to open public school restrooms and shower rooms according to “gender identity” and allow boys who believe they are girls to use girls’ facilities.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth found that the Obama administration did not follow proper procedures in creating the directives. Further, he said the guidelines contradicted existing statutes and regulatory texts, the Dallas Morning News reported.
The ruling follows the Obama administration’s order to allow transgendered persons to serve in the military.
In defense of its order, the government has cited Title IX regulations, arguing “sex” is a protected class. The lawsuit counters that the government is presuming that when Congress adopted the law in 1972, it had open restrooms and shower rooms in view.
Reacting to the ruling, Matt Sharp of Alliance Defending Freedom said the Obama administration “cannot unilaterally disregard and redefine federal law to accomplish its political agenda of forcing girls to share locker rooms and showers with boys.”
“The court in this case made clear that the administration ignored the federally required public notice and comment process as well as the crystal clear meaning of Title IX in its attempt to force its will on the American people,” he said.
“We are currently reviewing the order to determine the positive impact this order has for the cases that ADF is litigating against the departments of Education and Justice in Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio. Schools have a duty to protect the privacy, safety, and dignity of all students, and this order certainly helps them in fulfilling that duty.”
The judge pointed out, “It cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex as used in [existing law] when it was enacted by DOE following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.”
Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver said the Obama directive “was a lawless and ridiculous act by the president and we must continue to reject the Obama bullies.”
“The facts show that one in four girls and one out of every six boys under 18 will be sexually assaulted,” Staver said. “This unconstitutional mandate would have only increased those statistics.”
The U.S. Supreme Court already has stepped into the issue blocking a court order in Virginia that gave a girl who identifies as a boy the right to use boys’ restrooms. The order will stand until the Supreme Court decides whether to accept the case.
The decision in Fort Worth came in a case brought by Texas and about a dozen other states. Texas officials said the administration’s demand “hold a gun to the head” of school districts, threatening them with the loss of funding.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told the Morning News it was an “illegal federal overreach.”
“This president is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people, and is threatening to take away federal funding from schools to force them to conform,” he said in a prepared statement.
The preliminary injunction, which comes as public schools prepare to reopen, applies nationwide.
“This case presents the difficult issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy when using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized,” the judge said.
VIDEO: TEXAS SAYS, “WE WILL NOT YIELD TO BLACKMAIL” FROM OBAMA
Dozens of pastors in Ohio lobbied for the state to ignore Obama’s mandate, and in Texas, officials suggested that was a viable option.
The Ohio pastors said in a letter that the Department of Education’s transgender advocacy “defies objectivity and logic.”
Further, in puts in jeopardy the safety of “vulnerable women and children.”
WND reported in July when family policy experts at the Ruth Institute warned the Obama administration agenda to push transgenderism on public schools forces children to adopt the “ideological agenda” of homosexuality.
The organization has issued a report on Obama’s “Guidance to Help Schools Ensure the Civil Rights of Transgender Students” released in May by the departments of Justice and Education.
The guidance requires that public schools and universities allow students to choose their “gender identity” and grant them access to gender-specific facilities. Since such identities are “fluid,” a student could see himself as male one day and female the next, according to administration guidelines.
It would allow a boy to shower with girls, for example, if he tells school officials he is a girl on that particular day. Obama’s rules specifically forbid schools from asking for any sort of documentation or medical evidence that a student is receiving hormone treatment or has had any surgery.
The guidance, however, ignores the right of students not to be exposed to unclothed members of the opposite sex.
A separate group of states also had sued, in addition to the case led by Texas, which charged Obama “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”
The Ruth Institute, dedicated to creating a Christ-like social movement to address family breakdown, said in its report that even “transgender” children are not helped.
“The transgender movement is controversial, even among the wider gay rights movement,” the report said. “Lesbian feminist professor Sheila Jeffreys describes male-bodied transgenders as invading women-only spaces and exercising a form of male privilege. The federal government should not be imposing an ideological agenda, much less taking sides in an internal quarrel within the larger gay rights movement.”
The report continued: “The public schools have no business enlisting small children in an ideological crusade of any kind. Creating a day to day living environment that implements the most controversial plank of the transgender political regime does exactly that: enlists the children in an ideological crusade. Certainly, the federal government should not be conscripting every public school in America in an ideological movement, an drafting every public school child in America as its foot soldiers.”
The report said school boards are within their rights to refuse to participate “in the federal government’s war against nature.”
The report was prepared by Jennifer Roback Morse, institute founder, who said the dictates from Washington are not helping people.
The guidance allows students to hide from their parents that they are presenting themselves as “transgender,” establishes “transgenders” as a political class but not a medical class and “will certainly harm the millions of ordinary children who are not struggling with gender identity issues,” the report said.
“These guidelines do not serve the interests of children. Young people are not fully developed in their sense of identity, including their sense of gender identity. Children who are so confused about who they are that they identify as something other than their bodily gender need adult supervision, and greater bodily privacy, not less of each. They would benefit from the supervision and privacy afforded by use of a single stall or staff bathroom,” the institute said.
Obama’s executive action allowing as many as 5 million illegal aliens to remain in the United States also has been suspended by a federal judge in an ongoing case.
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/judge-blocks-obamas-transgenders-schools-mandate/#0BJBbKEj3XWzj9Ec.99