President Joe Biden is using executive orders to undermine state laws that curb LGBTQI+ initiatives in public schools, trying to garner political points with the LGBT community during its so-called pride month.
The White House announced Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to combat state laws that prohibit transgender athletes from participating in girl's sports. It also targets policies, like Florida's Parental Rights Law, that prevent indoctrination of kindergarteners through third graders on sexual orientation or gender identity ideology.
And it directs federal agencies to expand access to gender-altering medical care for young people.
The Department of Health and Human Services will also explore guidance to clarify that federally-funded programs cannot offer so-called "conversion therapy."
The president is also directing the Department of Education to release a sample school policy for achieving full inclusion for LGBTQI+ students.
As CBN's Faithwire reported, a just-released analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation calls into question the left's oft-repeated claim that giving puberty blockers and hormone therapies prevent suicide in children who experience gender dysphoria — feeling out of sync with their biological sex.
The author of the report, Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, and Youth Suicide concluded there is no compelling data to convincingly assert controversial medical interventions dissuade transgender-identified children from committing suicide.
"The claim that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones prevent suicides is being used by the Biden administration and state policymakers to ease access to those drugs," Jay Greene, a senior research fellow for the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Wire. "As it turns out, the science behind that claim is extremely weak and when the evidence is examined properly, it shows that making cross-sex treatments more widely available risks raising youth suicide rates rather than reducing them."
The Heritage study — which has not been peer-reviewed — comes not long after President Joe Biden joined the chorus of those strongly advocating for "early" interventions for transgender-identified kids.
Agriculture Department to Withhold Food Funding Unless Schools Adopt Transgender Bathrooms
As CBN News reported late last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking steps to ensure schools comply with Biden's transgender agenda. If schools don't adopt transgender bathroom policies, the Biden administration reportedly plans to withhold food funds intended for needy children.
Earlier this month, the department's Food and Nutrition Service announced it will interpret the prohibition on discrimination based on sex found in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and in the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Federalist reports what all that legal jargon means is that K-12 schools will have to allow transgender boys into girls' bathrooms, showers, and sleeping quarters to obtain federal funds for lunches, breakfasts, and snacks.
A U.S. Department of Education spokesman told the news outlet there will be press releases from several agencies within the Biden administration announcing this policy, followed by formal rulemaking in June.
Trans Bathroom Policies Can Put Girls at Risk
As CBN News has reported, outrage over a student, who was charged with bathroom-related sexual assault at two different school campuses, prompted parents to speak out against Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) making questionable accommodations for transgender students.
A teenage girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom at Stonebridge High School back in May of 2021 after a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls' bathroom.
The transgender teen was later found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to remain on supervised probation in a locked juvenile treatment facility until his 18th birthday.
Court Halts Biden Transgender Mandates That Cripple Countless Christian-Owned Businesses
As CBN News also reported in May, a federal district court issued an order temporarily halting the enforcement of two Biden administration transgender mandates.
The mandates force both non-profit and for-profit religious employers and healthcare providers to pay for and perform surgeries, procedures, counseling, and treatments that seek to alter a patient's biological sex even if such actions violate the employers' or providers' religious beliefs.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys requested the preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the nonprofit Christian Employers Alliance (CEA). The U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota found that CEA is likely to prevail in its suit and therefore issued the order halting enforcement of the transgender mandates against CEA while the lawsuit proceeds.
The CEA lawsuit argues that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is misinterpreting and improperly enforcing discrimination based on sex in Title VII to force religious employers to pay for and provide health insurance coverage for such surgeries and procedures.
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Additionally, the lawsuit challenges the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' reinterpretation of "sex" in federal law to include gender identity. That HHS redefinition of "sex" forces religious healthcare providers who receive federal funding to physically perform or facilitate surgeries and procedures that conflict with their deeply held beliefs.
"No government agency ought to be in the business of evaluating the sincerity of another's religious beliefs," the court wrote in its order in Christian Employers Alliance v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Doctors, Other Medical Professionals Fight Biden's 'Transgender Mandate'
A growing number of doctors and medical professionals have filed legal action against the Biden administration over its Transgender Mandate for violating a doctor's medical judgment or religious beliefs.
Last August, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys, representing 3,000 doctors and medical professionals from the American College of Pediatricians, Catholic Medical Associates, and an OB-GYN doctor who specializes in caring for adolescents, challenged the mandate in a lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The suit cites medical professionals objecting to performing such procedures on any patient, especially children.
The lawsuit challenges the move by the federal government to force doctors to perform gender transition surgeries, advise patients to take puberty blockers, and document details about patients based on their preferred gender identity.
2 Federal Courts Have Already Struck Down the 'Transgender Mandate
As CBN News reported in January of 2021, a federal court in North Dakota struck down the "Transgender Mandate."
According to Becket Law, the mandate was first issued in 2016 under the Obama administration, forcing members of the healthcare community to violate their medical judgment and religious beliefs.
In Nov. of 2016, Becket filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sisters of Mercy and several religious organizations against the transgender provision of the Affordable Care Act.
The ruling was put on hold and in 2019 another federal court in Texas struck it down. In June of 2020, Biden's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new directive, but as CBN News reported in August of 2021, a federal court in Texas blocked the administration from enforcing the policy.
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