On April 19, the leftist administration of US Democrat leader Joe Biden published amendments to the 1972 Title IX federal law, widening the federal government’s ban against “discrimination” to presently cover “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.”
The Title IX changes are poised to eradicate due process protections included during the administration of former US President Donald Trump and consider “all claimed sexual orientations” and “gender identities”, including putting in place protections for cross-sex restroom use.
Since 2022, Biden’s woke Education Department has been cracking their brains to find ways to widen Title IX to permit transgender athletes to play on female sports teams and to use private spaces for women, including restrooms and locker rooms, as long as these spaces align with the “gender identities” of these gender-confused athletes.
By dismissing the self-evident reality of biological sex, and replacing it with the personal and subjective sense of “gender identity”, the Biden administration is effectively enshrining the lie that “you are whatever you think you are or claim you feel” into federal diktats.
By dismissing the self-evident reality of biological sex, and replacing it with the personal and subjective sense of “gender identity”, the Biden administration is effectively enshrining the lie that “you are whatever you think you are or claim you feel” into federal diktats.
In turn, conservatives were quick to lambast Biden’s new Title IX amendments.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Florida governor Ron de Santis posited :
“Florida’s response to Joe Biden trying to inject gender ideology into education, undermining opportunities for girls and women, violating parents' rights, and abusing his constitutional authority: We will not comply.”
Likewise, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters announced on April 25 that he has informed schools within his state not to abide by the Biden amendments Title IX.
“We will fight Joe Biden every day to keep this social Marxism out of Oklahoma,” Walters proclaimed to Fox News Digital. “This is a time for states to rise up against the federal government’s assault on young girls.”
Also, Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Rachel Rouleau slammed Biden’s Title IX amendments, declaring in a press release:
“The Biden administration’s radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women, threatens student safety and privacy, and undermines fairness in women’s sports. It is a slap in the face to women and girls who have fought long and hard for equal opportunities.”
“The administration continues to ignore biological reality, science, and commonsense, and women are suffering as a result. The administration’s new regulation will have devastating consequences on the future of women’s sports, student privacy, and parental rights, which is why Alliance Defending Freedom plans to take action to defend female athletes, as well as school districts, teachers, and students who will be gravely harmed by this unlawful government overreach,” Rouleau stated.
This may well be the most anti-woman regulation of all time. It will be the end of women’s sports, sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, sororities, and dorms — all vanquished by an administrative state fiat that almost no one supports, which is why the Biden administration advanced it in the dark of night.
In February this year, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supervised Trump administration reform of Title IX, boosting protections for women, revealed to the Washington Examiner that Biden’s changes “may well be the most anti-woman regulation of all time.”
“This may well be the most anti-woman regulation of all time. It will be the end of women’s sports, sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, sororities, and dorms — all vanquished by an administrative state fiat that almost no one supports, which is why the Biden administration advanced it in the dark of night,” DeVos lamented. “Every parent and child should be horrified this rule is moving forward.”
Adding, DeVos said that the Biden ruling “returns us to the untenable days where there is no due process on campus and instead radical gender ideologues call all the shots.”
Moreover, DeVost slammed the rule as “sexist, illegal, and unpopular, but appeasing the far-left flank is more important to the Biden administration than doing what’s right for students.”
Besides, the same February article by the Washington Examiner cited Robert S. Eitel, the co-founder and president of the Defense of Freedom Institute as saying that Biden’s new rule would make it more challenging for accused parties under Title IX “to be treated fairly during the adjudication process because it replaces standards of objectivity installed under the Trump administration rule with a Pandora’s box of subjectivity that ran rampant under the Obama administration.”
In context, the Trump administration oversaw tweaks to Title IX regulations in 2020 to address free speech and due process concerns, relying on legal standards adopted by the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education.
As per the Davis standard, schools could only penalize conduct that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it can be properly regarded as harassing conduct that effectively prevents another student from obtaining an education. As schools could not punish mere speech with such due process standards in place, they could tackle harassment under Title IX while ensuring the First Amendment rights of students.
Nonetheless, the new Biden proposal substitutes the legal standards set in place during Trump’s presidency with language that defines sexual harassment as “conduct that is sufficiently severe or pervasive, that, based on the totality of the circumstances and evaluated subjectively and objectively, denies or limits a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.”
The policies of the Biden administration are a somber reminder to American and international observers on what public life will be, once Our Lord Jesus Christ, along with Catholic teaching, are dismissed.
Without objective legal standards in place, Biden’s new ambiguous changes would likely empower woke Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) administrators with their feel-good bromides to determine what “conduct that is sufficiently severe or pervasive” means.
Sounds like a certain NPR censor-in-chief’s fears that “the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is “the First Amendment in the United States” could be allayed with Biden’s new Title IX changes.
The recent Biden-administration changes to Title IX are not entirely surprising, given the White House’s recent declaration of Easter Sunday to be “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Good Friday, March 29, besides Biden’s other religiously offensive gaffes.
Upon closer scrutiny, the policies of the Biden administration are a somber reminder to American and international observers on what public life will be, once Our Lord Jesus Christ, along with Catholic teaching, are dismissed:
Objective standards will be replaced by subjective trends and feelings.
The immutable God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will be forgotten in lieu of corruptible golden calves.
Our Lord Jesus Christ will be once again betrayed for thirty pieces of tarnishable silver.
Traditionally, Christian doctrine as taught by the Roman Catholic Church had given rulers of societies objective points of reference for governance and morality.
Traditionally, Christian doctrine as taught by the Roman Catholic Church had given rulers of societies objective points of reference for governance and morality.
For instance, in his encyclical Immortale Dei, the saintly and scholarly Pope Leo XIII had this to say:
“...no society can hold together unless someone be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every body politic must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its Author. Hence, it follows that all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from God.’”
Similarly, in Mirari Vos, Pope Gregory XVI firmly spoke out against “liberty of conscience”:
“ …that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly ‘the bottomless pit’ is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.”
Yet, despite numerous papal exhortations, “liberty of conscience” has become a mantra of many leftists today, except when such “liberty” does not fit in their agendas”, such as during the COVID-19 pseudo-pandemic era.
Before he ascended the Throne of Saint Peter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), bemoaned the “dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely’ of satisfying ‘the desires of one’s own ego.”
In that same sermon, the future pontiff elaborated:
“How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.”
Sadly, the United States of America, “one nation under God”, is still intransigent in its denial of the truth of the Catholic Faith by pursuing the “freedom of error” criticized above by Pope Gregory XVI.
Only the condescending mercy of Jesus Christ, “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life”, can rescue this beautiful country, and the rest of the world, from falling into “the bottomless pit”.
“Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68)
Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of the United States, pray for us!
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