Make it this one. It is far and away the most important of the many important stories we published on Thursday.
Contrary to the law and common sense, the Obama administration has successfully pressured California's Arcadia Unified School District into allowing a teenage girl who is just entering high school to use the boys' restroom, locker room, and to sleep in the same hotel room as boys without adult supervision during field trips.
The young teenager is “transgender” and considers herself a male but is still biologically female.
Her parents, incredibly, sued the AUSD because its administrators would not allow their daughter “to bunk with [her] buddies in the boys’ cabin and without [her] father being present.”
Under the terms of the agreement the Obama administration wrangled out of the school district, any student who claims to “transgender” must be given the right to avail herself – or himself – of the opposite sex's showers and hotel rooms, no questions asked.
Anyone who looks askance at the potential improprieties inherent in this arrangement could be subject to a civil rights lawsuit and that worst of all modern crimes, being labeled “intolerant.”
This reality, almost entirely absent from mainstream news coverage, defies parody. Next to the gargantuan list of female teachers having sex with their students, the Obama administration has made the most common cliché of teen sex comedies a legally enforced reality.
Beyond the snickers, though, is an instructive lesson: The Left twists the law and uses raw power to enact its agenda.
In the letter to the school district, civil rights officials in the Justice Department and the Department of Education wrote that AUSD may be running afoul of federal anti-discrimination law:
Under Title IX, “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a). Under the Title IX regulations, a school district may not treat individuals differently on the basis of sex with regard to any aspect of services, benefits, or opportunities it provides. 34 C.F.R. §§ 106.31(a)-(b). All students, including transgender students and students who do not conform to sex stereotypes, are protected from sex-based discrimination under Title IX and Title IV.
Wading through the legalese, one sees that these statutes forbid discrimination based on sex.
How does that cover “transgender” issues? In the same sense that “privacy” guarantees the right to an abortion, or the First Amendment clause against establishing a national church forbids prayer in schools. It doesn't.
There is no federal law forbidding alleged “discrimination” against those experiencing gender confusion. The Obama administration has simply wrenched a law designed to prevent male chauvinism out of its legal context and applied it to transvestites.
This is, in fact, nothing new. I have been writing about this for years.
Almost exactly three years ago, Obama's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced “a clarification of existing policy” stating, in the words of a homosexual news source, “that, although the Fair Housing Act…does not specifically cover sexual orientation or gender identity-based discrimination, it may still cover them in other ways. For example, gender-identity discrimination may be seen as sex discrimination.”
That is, the government may prosecute a landlord who refuses to rent the spare room to a man wearing a dress on the grounds that he hates women.
This is jurisprudence by sophistry, a legal theory crafted from word association. The Obama administration has used an irrelevant law to impose its radical social agenda.
At the heart of the Obama administration's critique is the notion that sexual identity is as malleable as the “living Constiution,” and eternally in flux.
Under this definition, a man who believes that he is a woman, is a woman. Anyone who insists that he is a man merely because he has a beard, a hairy chest, and inappropriate reproductive anatomy is a bigot who is motivated by base animus against those who “do not conform to sex stereotypes.”
Since sex is a matter of feeling and not biology, a person could switch between gender identities multiple times during a lifetime, even during a year.
Producing chaos benefits the aspiring totalitarian because, as the Founding Fathers understood, once the citizens lose the ability to maintain moral order for themselves the State will impose its own morality from without.
Laws that defy reality aid the power-hungry, because only the State can enforce the illusion that a man is a woman, that a promiscuous gay couple is “married,” that a baby is an undifferentiated clump of cells, and that anyone who believes otherwise is a hate-filled extremist. A once free people will tolerate policies that are so blatantly ridiculous only if they are under threat of ruin – as the AUSD felt before it crumpled against the threat of a federal lawsuit.
When in power, they misapply the law, legislate from the bench, or like a certain clerk in Pennsylvania, simply begin enacting their agenda in contravention of the law.
That is the modus operandi of the cultural Left: It operates by ruse, through lawlessness, backing its base dictates with brute force.
All of this could be foreseen, as Barack Obama said he believed that the notoriously activist Warren Court “wasn’t that radical,” because it “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution”; that the U.S. Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties” that “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day”; and that “an activist Attorney General’s office and Justice Department” is necessary to enact “redistributive change.”
The AUSD story proves either that the media are hiding the lawless mechanisms of the radical Left from the American people, or that a degraded U.S. citizenry has come to favor public approval, redistribution of wealth, and racial division over the common sense that says a teenage girl should not sleep in a hotel room full of teenage boys without a chaperone.
Cross-posted at TheRightsWriter.com.