The problem with federal money is that it always comes with strings attached. Our local school boards no longer have the freedoms they once had because many of their decisions are determined by the federal Department of Education and linked to grants and funding. The Biden administration is using grants and funding in order to advance its radical agenda on child sexuality.
On Sunday, Just the News reported the following:
A new Biden administration rule forces schools to comply with progressive ideology on gender and sexuality or risk losing the federal aid for free and reduced-price school lunches.
Legal observers say this is just the first in a slew of new rules on the horizon tying federal education funding to far-left policies on gender and sexuality.
The school lunch funding controvesy began in May 2022, as The Center Square previously reported, with an announcement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which handles federal help for school lunches.
The USDA said at the time it would change its longstanding interpretation of Title IX, the law broadly governing discrimination protections in education. USDA said it would expand its previous prohibition against discriminating based on sex “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
School lunch funding goes through the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of USDA.
The article notes:
“This is a significant departure from what Title IX has always been interpreted to be,” Sarah Perry, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation and expert on this issue, told The Center Square.
With an ever-growing number of orientations and gender identities, and despite the political divide on the issue, schools will now be forced to comply on the complex and highly politicized gender and sexuality issue.
“This is no small change,” Perry said. “This is a significant interpretation to say that sex equals sexual orientation and gender identity when Title IX, we know, dates back to 1972 and the women’s liberation movement, and at the time there was an entire campaign by LGBTQ activists to be included in anti-discrimination law indicating that they themselves did not believe that they were protected in these particular contexts.”
Is there anyone is Congress who is willing to stand up to this? This is not a law–it’s a regulation. Does anyone in Congress have the courage to propose a law that will prevent this from happening?