Enforcement of a federal rule expanding anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students has been blocked in four states and a patchwork of places elsewhere by a federal judge in Kansas.
U.S. District Judge John Broomes suggested in his ruling Tuesday that the Biden administration must now consider whether forcing compliance remains “worth the effort.”
Broomes’ decision was the third against the rule from a federal judge in less than three weeks but more sweeping than the others. It applies in Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, which sued over the new rule. It also applies to a Stillwater, Oklahoma, middle school that has a student suing over the rule and to members of three groups backing Republican efforts nationwide to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. All of them are involved in one lawsuit.
Broomes, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, directed the three groups — Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United — to file a list of schools in which their members’ children are students so that their schools also do not comply with the rule. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican who argued the states’ case before Broomes last month, said that could be thousands of schools.
Apparently these judges can’t read:
https://natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-holds-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-are-protected-title-vii
Even by their own facist supreme court, discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity inherently involves discrimination on the basis of sex (ie, if someone assigned woman at birth can wear a dress but someone assigned man at birth can’t, if an assigned woman can kiss a man but an assigned man can’t, these are both discrimination on the basis of sex). So any law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex will logically have to apply to gender indentity and sexual orientation as well. While the ruling was about title vii, there’s no reason the same logic wouldn’t apply to title ix as well. Title ix can also protect sexual orientation and gender, because there’s no way to discrimate on that basis without discriminating on the basis of sex at the same time.
It’s totally ridiculous to try and say otherwise. Like take a cis woman being fired from her job because her boss hates women: “No I didn’t discriminate against this person because they were assigned woman at birth, I did so because they identify as a woman.” “oh well that’s alright then I guess”/s
Opponents who try to seperate sex from sexual orientation and gender indentity definitions when this is logically impossible, will essentially neuter the power the law has to help anyone, whether cis or trans, straight or gay, from discrimination. But that could be the object of some of their intentions as well I suppose.
Let’s hope the supreme court keeps the same reasoning as their previous ruling when this is inevitably appealed up.
I have no faith in SCOTUS. I will not be surprised when they make contradictory rulings because reasons.