A federal judge has ruled in favor of the 20 state attorney’s general who sued the Biden Administration over its pro-transgender directives.
The trans-happy administration issued the directives following the 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners. In a great disappointment to celebrants of Trump’s newly “conservative” SCOTUS, a 6-3 majority of justices decided that employers could not discriminate against “transgender” employees. It decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans bias against workers based on their sex, also extends protection to people’s imaginary sex.
The trans totalitarians in the Biden administration pounced on the ruling.
The Department of Education unilaterally decided the decision also applied to Title IX and directed that schools must allow boys who felt like girls to compete on girls’ teams and use girls’ restrooms, showers, and locker facilities. (It would also protect girls who wished to swap genders and compete against biological males, but inexplicably to the Left, that isn’t as much of a thing.) The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance that employers must go all-in on the trans train and instructed offended gender-benders on how to sue bosses who didn’t sufficiently affirm their feelings. And the Department of Justice began menacing recalcitrant states with legal headaches in an attempt to force them to override their own properly passed laws.
In August 2021, the attorneys general from 20 states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia — sued the DOE, EEOC, and DOJ for relief from the oppressive overreach. Such authority “properly belongs to Congress, the States and the people,” they argued.
On Friday, Eastern District of Tennessee Judge Charles Atchley Jr. (also a Trump appointee) agreed, writing, “The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown a credible threat of enforcement.” The New York Post reports:
[Judge Atchley] ruled in favor of 20 Republican state attorney generals [sic] who sued last August, arguing that the federal directives would make it impossible for states to enforce their own rules about transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports or accessing bathrooms.
Atchley issued the temporary injunction until the matter can be resolved in the courts.
“As demonstrated above, the harm alleged by Plaintiff States is already occurring — their sovereign power to enforce their own legal code is hampered by the issuance of Defendants’ guidance and they face substantial pressure to change their state laws as a result.”
Atchley also noted that the Bostock decision “explicitly refused to decide whether ‘sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes’ violate Title VII.”
The Biden administration will now be forced to hold off cracking down on dissident states and companies at least until the U.S. District Court in Knoxville, Tenn., issues its decision in the case.
Source: PJ Media
