Creep of the week: U.S. Supreme Court

By D’Anne Witkowski

What if I told you that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Biden Administration’s rule protecting LGBTQ+ students from discrimination in schools must be enforced in all 50 states? That would be pretty incredible, wouldn’t it?

And by incredible I mean not at all credible, because of course the extremist-packed Supreme Court did the exact opposite.

Biden sought to expand protections under Title IX, which bans discrimination based on sex, to include gender identity and sexual orientation.

And, of course, leaders across the United States were like, “Yes! Of course! We must protect people.”
Alas, that is also not true.

According to Reuters, lawsuits were filed by “Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Idaho, and numerous Louisiana school boards, and another lawsuit by Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia and an association of Christian educators.”

So, yeah.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argued that the Biden administration had overstepped and that the rule “adopts a controversial worldview about ‘gender identity,’ orders schools in every state to conform their policies to it and threatens dissenters with the loss of billions in federal funding,” according to The New York Times.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill was also aghast at the Biden Administration trying to protect people she, personally, does not like or consider fully human. She called it “extreme gender ideology.”
“This is all for a political agenda, ignoring significant safety concerns for young women students in pre-schools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities across Louisiana and the entire country,” Murrill said according to Reuters.

Ah. Ignoring “safety concerns for young women.” In other words, Murrill is peddling the transphobic lie that transgender people are perverts who pose a threat to women and girls. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of women and girls who are victims of sexual assault are assaulted by cisgender men. If only Republicans were as committed to stopping something that actually happens on the regular.
Murrill complained that if the Biden Administration’s Title IX rule was enforced, schools would “have to change the way they behave and the way they speak.”

Well, if the schools in question are discriminating against LGBTQ+ students and calling them offensive epithets, then, yes. The schools would have to change. That’s kind of the whole point of the proposed rule change. Because grown-ass adults all over the country can’t be trusted to not harass and terrorize children and young adults based on religious convictions that ensure them that God wants them to be total creeps.

Look, I don’t speak for God. But being nice to kids doesn’t seem like a real stretch when it comes to the whole “what would Jesus do” thing.

Needless to say, LGBTQ+ advocates are not happy.

“These are not just policies they’re attacking; they’re attacking human beings — our children — who deserve love, respect and acceptance,” SarahJane Guidry, executive director of Forum for Equality, Louisiana’s LGBTQ+ human rights organization, told the Shreveport Times.

“It is disappointing that the Supreme Court has allowed far-right forces to stop the implementation of critical civil rights protections for youth,” Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign, said, according to The New York Times.

Disappointing, indeed. But not at all surprising. The Supreme Court has a solid right-wing majority with a mandate to bring home wins for the religious right.

If the current Supreme Court justices were on the bench in 2015, there would be no marriage equality. It, like abortion, would be up to individual states to decide. We’d be right back to a time when married LGBTQ+ people faced a patchwork of legal rights — when you could travel across the country and be legally married then legally not married over and over again, depending on what state you were in.

Speaking of abortion, this “let the states decide” bullshit is not working out great. You don’t have to look far to find horror stories about a post-Roe world, especially for people of color.

If they overturned the right to an abortion, you can bet your ass they will overturn the right to be legally married. And hetero folks aren’t safe, either. These folks also want to do away with no-fault divorce and ban birth control.

Republicans are a danger to freedom, full stop. We’ve got to vote them out. And we definitely need to keep disgraced former president and convicted felon Donald Trump from setting foot in the White House ever again.

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