I'm reading through the unofficial final Title IX rule right now, and my first takeaway is that it appears to have been written entirely by TRAs. My second takeaway is that if this stands, we have permanently ended women's sports.
Third takeaway: There are First Amendment problems with this regulation that the agency repeatedly dismisses without addressing. This will be a problem for the Biden admin in litigation.
Also, these are arguments that will come up in litigation. (from p. 1214)
"The Department’s interpretation of Title IX to cover sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination readjusts the balance between State and Federal authority, implicating the Tenth Amendment, sets up potential conflicts with State laws, weakens local control of education, and undermines the Department’s compliance with the Department of Education Organization Act, 20 U.S.C. 3403(b)."
Here is the DOE's response to the argument that coverage of sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination is at odds with the purpose of Title IX:
What I can't wrap my head around is that the entire 1577-page document requires a person to suspend truth and biological reality and believe in a very specific abstract ideology.
One of the problems that led to this absurd result is the civic illiteracy of Americans. 9 out of 10 people have no idea this is going on. They had no idea there was a public comment period, or how to participate. They won't find out this happened until their daughter loses to a male in some athletic contest.
@SteveMillerOC To expand, if we are forced under the law to accept the notion that a man who wishes to identify as a woman is a woman, then we cannot exclude that woman from female sports.
If you haven't read the text of Title IX, you should. Essentially, today's rule attempts to undermine the entire statute and its purpose. Biden and Cardona have literally no idea what they are talking about. They will be sued, and they will lose. justice.gov/crt/title-ix-e…
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I'm skimming the Big Beautiful Bill (that is its actual name) and some things are jumping out at me in the student loan reform section. Congress is calling out "low earning outcomes" programs and restricting use of certain federal funds for those programs.
BTW they're also taxing private university endowments. 😮
8% tax on endowments over 2 million.
SALT cap temporarily raised to 40k, with reductions for people making over 500k annually. It will revert back to 10,000 in 2030.
The main holding of Mahmoud v. Taylor: "In light of the record before us, we hold that the Board’s introduction of the “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks—combined with its decision to withhold notice to parents and to forbid opt outs—substantially interferes with the religious development of their children and imposes the kind of burden on religious exercise that Yoder found unacceptable."
California school districts that prohibit notice and opt outs of gender and sexuality content (usually found in AR 6142.8) are in direct violation of First Amendment as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court in Mahmoud.
On p. 25: "These books carry with them “a very real threat of undermining” the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children. Yoder, 406 U. S., at 218. Like the compulsory high school education considered in Yoder, these books impose upon children a set of values and beliefs that are “hostile” to their parents’ religious beliefs. Id., at 211. And the books exert upon children a psychological “pressure to conform” to their specific viewpoints. Ibid. The books therefore present the same kind of “objective danger to the free exercise of religion” that we identified in Yoder. Id., at 218."
"These books" means the same books that Newsom, Thurmond, Bonta, and the State of California have been force feeding California children.
From p. 26 "In other contexts, we have recognized the potentially coercive nature of classroom instruction of this kind. “The State exerts great authority and coercive power through” public schools “because of the students’ emulation of teachers as role models and the children’s susceptibility to peer pressure.” ... Young children, like those of petitioners, are often “impressionable” and “implicitly trus[t]” their teachers...
Here, the Board requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents’ religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children and accuse them of being “hurtful” when they express a degree of religious confusion... Such instruction “carries with it precisely the kind of objective danger to the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.”"
No more ideological indoctrination on sexuality and gender topics! Once again, this directly conflicts with California's coercive teaching methods on these topics.
In addition to declaring war on Los Angeles and the Trump administration, Gavin Newsom also sued the federal government yesterday to demand inclusion of males in girls sports. Here is my reaction to the lawsuit:
Use of the term "cisgender" is disqualifying, but we're in San Francisco, and things are different there.
California refers to Ed Code 221.5(f), which requires that schools allow kids to use the facilities and play on teams that align with their gender identity instead of sex, as an "equal opportunity law." Which is ironic, because its logical end is the elimination of girls sports.
I have lost my patience with propagandist media. When I give my time to a journalist and carefully explain legal issues, and the journalist then turns out a propagandist piece based on false information and incredibly biased opinion, it makes me mad. 1/11
When Linda Jacobson at @the74 reached out to me in April to discuss the FERPA complaint I filed with the USDOE, I thought she wanted to write about the hideous concealment scheme implemented by California school districts to hide information from parents. 2/11
I gave her a lot of time on the phone, and followed up with links to documents. In the end, she never read my FERPA complaint--which has been posted online since January. 3/11
"Because existing precedent did not expressly
address Regino’s articulation of her asserted fundamental rights, the district court held that the rights she asserted were not fundamental. This was error. We have never held that a plaintiff asserting a substantive due process claim must show that existing precedent clearly establishes the asserted fundamental right, and we see no reason to import this standard now."
To me, this is great. At issue is the concept of fundamental parental rights in the context of a school transitioning a child without informing the parent.
Last week, Assemblyman Bill Essayli asked the Legislature to investigate allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice against a sitting member who has been accused of soliciting and accepting bribes. 1/x
The plea agreement refers to the member as "Person 20," an elected official who, starting in 2017 and ending in November 2018, was running for State elected office. 2/x
The DOJ alleges Person 20 approached defendant, former Baldwin Park city attorney Robert Tafoya, and asked him to solicit a bribe payment from a company seeking a marijuana permit in the City using the same intermediary scheme utilized by councilman Ricardo Pacheco. 3/x