It’s Time for the Department of Education to be DOA in Light of Biden’s New Title IX Rules
Biological males in girls’ bathrooms and dorms?
Sanctions if you don’t use somebody’s preferred pronouns?
Bringing back kangaroo courts for your sons, brothers and fathers?
These are only some of the new Title IX rules dictated to you by the US Department of Education’s unelected and unaccountable Office for Civil Rights, which released them at 5 a.m. Friday — right in the middle of school spring-recess season, when its radical-left apparatchiks knew hardly anyone would be watching.
Three years in the making, the new rules fulfill President Biden’s campaign promise to put a “quick end” to the limited protections Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos introduced in 2020.
The process was overseen by Assistant Secretary of Education Catherine Lhamon, a radical-feminist attorney who held the same post under President Barack Obama.
In those days, Obama deputized then-Vice President Biden to manage a grotesque expansion of Title IX to create vast campus bureaucracies to police language, behavior and sexual initiative and trash 1,000 years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.
Initiated in 2011, that Title IX enlargement has led to hundreds of lawsuits filed almost entirely by male respondents alleging unlawful discrimination, defamation, breach of contract and other torts.
Most have been successful and resulted in large settlements or judgments against our already-failing institutions.
According to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, academia’s leftist professional rag, Title IX “coordinators” — DEI bureaucrats hired at above-average salaries to run campus-sex Gestapos — report well-deserved high rates of stress, ostracism and burnout.
In some surveys, as many as 91% of Americans, including even liberal luminaries like late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, believe Title IX went too far then. (Even Obama, criticizing wokeness and cancel culture in 2019, said, “The world is messy; there are ambiguities.”)
But it’s back — with a vengeance.
DeVos, whose reforms were far from comprehensive in restoring basic rights to the accused on campus, characterized Biden’s overhaul as a “radical rewrite” that “guts the half century of protections and opportunities for women” and an “endeavor born entirely of progressive politics, not sound policy.”
The big news is that Biden’s Title IX rules for the first time expand the definition of “sex” to include sexual orientation and transgender identity.
These factors were never considered in the original civil-rights legislation decades ago or at any time since, but their inclusion purportedly harmonizes Education Department dictates with a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that found sexual orientation and gender identity are protected characteristics under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Team Biden had planned to go further and outlaw school bans on transgendered students playing on opposite-birth-gender sports teams, but that didn’t make the final cut — it’s a highly unpopular position that could endanger the larger project as well as Biden’s struggling reelection bid. It’ll likely be resurrected if the president wins a second term.
Just as nefariously, the rules restore Obama-era restrictions on access to counsel, evidence, cross-examination, hearings and other time-honored protections for the accused, whose guilt or innocence must in most cases be determined by a shifty “preponderance of the evidence” standard.
If that sounds unfair, remember that it is all brought to you by a notoriously wasteful $79 billion bureaucracy employing more than 4,400 feds whose mission in life is to control what and how your kids learn — whether you like it or not and without any constitutional basis.
Since the Department of Education’s establishment in 1980, its record has been a 44-year cavalcade of failure, reducing the world’s number-one educational system — which did just fine without it for more than two centuries — to an embarrassing 33rd place in those completing higher education.
Our math and reading scores rank merely in the middle among developed countries.
Now the Education Department wants to re-empower an army of perverts and ideologues to deprive our educational communities of basic rights and enforce radical gender ideology over your kids — all while you suckers pay for it.
The time for abolition has come.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
