Chattanooga Times Free Press

COURT SHOULD REJECT OBAMA’S RADICAL SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

- A former U.S. senator for South Carolina, Jim DeMint is president of the Heritage Foundation. Roger Severino is the director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

Once it had convinced the Supreme Court to redefine marriage for the entire nation, you would think the Obama administra­tion would have paused and let the country catch its breath. It didn’t.

Instead, it raced to impose radical new gender identity policies on states, employers, hospitals and even our school children — all without a hint of congressio­nal approval.

Late last month, the Supreme Court agreed to take a case that will either roll back this massive government overreach or allow the administra­tion to redefine what it means to be a man and a woman under law.

First, some background. The Obama administra­tion says a person’s sex is not something that can be objectivel­y determined by birth. Rather, it is merely a placeholde­r “assigned at birth,” much like a Social Security number, only far easier to change.

According to the administra­tion, one’s actual sex is discovered later in life, can range from “male, female, neither, or a combinatio­n of male and female,” and doesn’t depend on genetics, anatomy, or dressing, acting, or looking a certain way.

While people should be free to believe whatever they want about these new gender identities, they should not be forced upon people who have reasonable scientific, philosophi­cal and religious objections for not going along.

The administra­tion has neverthele­ss threatened to strip schools of their funding unless teachers and students treat others according to their self-declared gender identities instead of biology.

Hearing this call, a gender-dysphoric teen girl in Virginia sued her school district to get full access to the boys’ bathrooms. Recognizin­g the competing interests at issue and trying to be compassion­ate, the school had already accommodat­ed her by installing single-occupancy unisex facilities, but the student was not satisfied. The Obama administra­tion swiftly weighed in on the case, called Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. Incredibly, it argued that when Congress banned sex discrimina­tion in education in 1972, it really banned gender identity discrimina­tion and that the schools’ accommodat­ion was not an act of sensitivit­y, but bigotry.

The Supreme Court has decided to hear the case, and if the rule of law still means anything, the court will take this opportunit­y to rein in an out-of-control executive branch.

This case will have ramificati­ons far beyond school shower, bathroom and dorm policies. That’s because the Obama administra­tion has unilateral­ly redefined “sex” to mean “gender identity” in a host of federal anti-discrimina­tion laws covering more than education — including housing, health care, employment, lending and federal contractin­g — even though the American people, through their representa­tives, have repeatedly rejected such extreme proposals.

The case will also affect the ability of states to protect their citizens’ privacy and safety interests. Twenty-four states have already sued the administra­tion for illegally dictating their state’s bathroom and shower policies. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory deserves tremendous credit for leading this effort and for standing against the “progressiv­e” bullies in the media, big business and the federal government.

We’ll find out what the Supreme Court thinks about all this soon enough. With any luck, the justices will uphold our laws as written and completely reject the administra­tion’s radical social experiment­s.

 ??  ?? Jim DeMint & Roger Severino
Jim DeMint & Roger Severino
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