Eleven states filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the Obama administration to challenge its federal guidance on how schools should accommodate transgender students.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on behalf of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit argues that the federal government has worked to turn workplaces and schools “into laboratories for a massive social experiment.” It also argues that the federal government is “flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children.”
The guidance, the lawsuit states, “has no basis in law” and could cause “seismic changes in the operations of the nation’s school districts.”
The official announcement of federal lawsuit came after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Twitter his state’s attorney general would “sue to stop Obama’s transgender directive to schools.” Abbott thanked Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, for the forthcoming lawsuit in that tweet early Wednesday afternoon following initial reports about the lawsuit.
“Our local schools are now in the crosshairs of the Obama administration, which maintains it will punish those schools who do not comply with its orders. These schools are facing the potential loss of school funding for simply following common sense policies that protect their students,” Paxton said at a news conference in Austin announcing the lawsuit Wednesday.
“This represents just the latest example of the current administration’s attempts to accomplish by executive fiat what they couldn’t accomplish through the democratic process in Congress,” he added. “By forcing through his policies by executive action, President Obama excluded the voice of the people. We stand today to ensure those voices are heard.”
The Justice and Education departments issued a guidance this month on how schools could better accommodate transgender students and provide them restroom facilities that match their gender identities. That guidance came after North Carolina passed legislation mandating transgender individuals use the bathroom facility that matches their birth gender.
Last week, Paxton and the attorneys general of Oklahoma and West Virginia wrote to the Justice and Education departments asking for clarity on the guidelines and what they mean for federal education funding should a state ignore the guidance. In that letter, they asked for an administration response by Tuesday May 24.
Source: Washington Examiner
