The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision denied the Biden-Harris administration's efforts to demand that their changes to Title IX go into effect. The Department of Education, under Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, issued new rules making sweeping changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act which creates equality in education. Those changes conflated biological sex with gender identity, making it so that protections set aside for women would also encompass men who said they were women.
Suit was brought against the Biden-Harris administration by groups that protested against the removal of these protections for women and girls. The new regulations, set to go into effect August 1, forced all schools that receive federal funds to allow boys to access girls bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities. This has led to problems in many schools where girls found themselves vulnerable to male students who entered the female spaces. One incident in Loudon County saw a girl raped by a male, skirt-wearing student. The rape was covered up and when the father complained about it he was arrested. This led directly to the Biden-Harris administration's prosecution of parents who complained at school board meetings.
"On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the Government has not provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule," read the unsigned court order.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a dissent, in which she was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices as well as Justice Neil Gorsuch. They agreed with the lower court's ruling that said the injunction against the implementation of the new rules was "over broad." The rules have been prevented from taking effect in every school district represented by a party in the lawsuit.
"By blocking the Government from enforcing scores of regulations that respondents never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here,” Sotomayor said.
While the decision is not a final ruling in the lawsuits against Cardona's new rules, the cases will now return to lower appeals courts where they will be sorted out while the injunctions remain in place. Cardona brought the changes after Biden demanded all federal agencies to make plans to be more inclusive of LGBTQIA+ Americans.
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