NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, October 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The Obama administration is appealing an injunction against its mandate for transgender bathrooms in public schools.
Last Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor rejected the Justice Department's request to limit his nationwide injunction against enforcement of Obama's redefined Title IX law that mandated opposite sex use of showers, locker rooms, and toilets. Obama threatened public schools with losing federal funding if they failed to comply.
The Justice Department had requested that O'Connor's injunction be limited to the 13 states where attorney generals sued to stop government-imposed transgender bathrooms. The judge responded that not only does he have the authority to issue a nationwide injunction, but “a geographically-limited injunction would be ineffective” because “both Title IX and Title VII rely on the consistent, uniform application of national standards.”
On Friday, the Obama Department of Education filed a notice that they will appeal to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. The Dallas Morning News noted that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals “is considered one of the most conservative federal appellate courts in the nation.”
“President Obama's obsession with this destructive transgender ideological agenda exposes his rank opposition to Constitutional rule as well as natural law and biological reality,” Arthur Christopher Schaper, director of California MassResistance, told LifeSiteNews. Schaper said the issue is a civil rights one. It is not about the “right” of gender-confused children to use opposite sex bathrooms but the right of citizens and schools not to have transgender ideology forced upon them.
“Male and female are clear, distinct identities, and any attempt to ignore or remove recognition of these distinctions is destined to fail, hurting children physically, mentally, and spiritually, and undermine the long-held truths of our society,” Schaper said.
“Any court ruling which attempts to force transgender ideologies into public schools (or anywhere) should be met with the same opposition which followed the abusive Plessy v. Ferguson or Korematsu v. United States Supreme Court rulings.”
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter from Plessy, famously writing, “There is a dangerous tendency in these latter days to enlarge the functions of the courts, by means of judicial interference with the will of the people as expressed by the legislature. Our institutions have the distinguishing characteristic that the three departments of government are coordinate and separate. Each must keep within the limits defined by the constitution.”
Korematsu v. United States (1944) upheld the constitutionality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order forcing Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship.
MassResistance Executive Director Brian Camenker agrees with his colleague, but he expressed skepticism to LifeSiteNews. “Unfortunately, this is probably only a temporary reprieve,” he said. “A federal judicial system that is capable of mandating 'gay marriage' is not going to be stopped here.”
Camenker then placed blame on conservative citizens who remain passive. “Our side is paying the price for not fighting this aggressively. Only talking about bathrooms and 'privacy' instead of attacking the core issue – the insanity of transgenderism – is a losing argument in the long run.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton believes this is an issue of executive overreach. He commented that Texas won’t sit idly by as President Obama “ignore(s) the Constitution” and added, “The president cannot rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people and then threaten to take away funding from schools to force them to fall in line.”
The issue of transgender use of opposite sex intimate facilities has created contrary opinions from the nation's courts. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia ruled the Obama transgender school mandate was constitutional and issued an injunction allowing Caitlyn Grimm, a transgender girl who changed her name to Gavin, to use the boys' facilities. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily stayed that injunction.
The day after Judge O'Connor granted the nationwide injunction, Paxton sued to also block Obama's new health care transgender accommodation mandate against physicians, hospitals and insurers.