November 23, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — Texas federal Judge Reed O’Connor has denied an administration request to issue a partial stay on his August nationwide injunction barring the enforcement of President Obama’s executive order pressuring schools to let gender-confused students use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms.
In his Nov. 20 decision, U.S. District Judge O’Connor said the Departments of Justice and Education “failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success or irreparable harm sufficient to justify a partial stay of the Court’s preliminary injunction.”
In his initial 38-page injunction, O’Connor challenged Obama’s interpretation and application of federal Titles VII and IX — created more than four decades ago to stop, among other things, sex-discrimination against women — to “gender identity.” The latter is a “transgender” activist concept incorporation dozens of “identities.” The preliminary injunction was sought by 13 states seeking protection against Obama’s order, which conservatives regard as an unconstitutional overreach of power.
Judge O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the law and its use of the term “sex” is “not ambiguous. “It cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex as … it was enacted by [the Department of Education] following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.”
Pro-religious liberty legal activist Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel (LC), applauded Judge O’Connor for his “steadfast stand against the Obama administration attempts to impose its unlawful and harmful LGBT agenda on public schools. The Obama directive is a lawless act and defies common sense.”
According to an LC release, “Connor wrote that the federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of ‘sex’ — the scope and meaning of which the federal government agencies claim now includes gender identity — were declared nearly 40 years ago. He referred specifically to the time gap between the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and this year, when the Obama administration announced its new transgender bathroom guidelines for public schools.”
“Defendants grossly misstate the scope of the injunction in claiming it prohibits states from receiving ‘federal enforcement of the civil rights laws,’” the judge wrote.
Pro-family advocates such as Heritage Foundation senior fellow Ryan Anderson have called on President-elect Trump to immediately rescind Obama’s “transgender” school executive order on the first day of his presidency.
In May, then-candidate Trump said he would repeal the policy and send the issue back to the states.
Concerns about some offensive — yet often underreported — aspects of the Obama administration's “transgender” federal guidance include:
- School districts must allow biological males and females to spend the night together in the same hotel room on field trips;
- Colleges must let men who say they are transgender be roommates with one or more women; and
- School officials cannot even tell those young women or their parents in advance that their new roommate is a man, without risking a federal lawsuit.