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John:
Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
The Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Friday to reject an emergency request to enforce portions of a Department of Education rule that reinterprets Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
The 1,577-page regulation intends to prohibit policies which prevent a “person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with the person’s gender identity” and requires schools to prevent “hostile environment harassment” which might limit or deny a person from receiving an educational benefit.
All of it is sufficiently vague enough to countenance all kinds of perceived slights in our modern era, including denying men who identify as women access to the women's restroom, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams, for example, or a failure of students or faculty to use preferred pronouns. In short, it’s an attempt to impose progressive values across every possible venue of American life and to use the powers of the state to punish those who dissent.
The Department of Education is hardly the only federal agency engaged in this type of wholesale imposition, however. A recent guidance document issued by the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission flat out requires harassment as a good business practice. In a recent hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Independent Women’s Forum analyst Inez Stepman explained it this way:
The Commission’s April 2024 guidance makes it “harassment” under Title VII to maintain sex-segregated private spaces, such as bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms. Additionally, the same guidance infringes on all employees’ freedom of speech and religious liberty by classifying “repeated and intentional” use of pronouns inconsistent with a person’s wishes as “harassment” under Title VII. Instead of preventing discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex as its mandate demands, the EEOC with this guidance requires employers to engage in both.
Stepman followed up with a post on X noting that her organization has “already received complaints from women in the workplace dealing with what this ludicrous EEOC guidance makes mandatory. For example, a woman who works in a chemical factory that requires showers after work for safety now must share that shower with a male.”
A “whole of government” approach can be used for great things: the moon landing, winning world wars, or even innovative efforts to get government out of the way, like the Trump administration’s “one in, two out” approach to regulating.
The Biden-Harris White House, by contrast, will be remembered for turning the machinery of government toward the erasure of female safety, standards, and merit in pursuit of a woke-obsessed public policy that benefits the radical exceptions at the expense of the rest of us. It is a reminder of just how much power the executive branch has to twist and contort the functions of daily life toward their own preferred ends. Congress can, of course, yank this power back as part of the appropriations process where the terms of agency funding are set. But their willingness to exercise that authority with any real impact is so rare that it has essentially become a theoretical exercise to point it out.
But the extreme nature of the regulations tumbling out of this White House underscores the importance of how government funding will be handled in September. A year-long funding bill will lock in this president’s policies for months after he departs. A short-term extension allows the opportunity of a reset early in 2025 – and for those being crushed by the White House’s obsession with bathroom politics and pronoun policies, offers at least the prospect of some relief.
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