transgender, children, students, school
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Undeterred by repeated losses, the Biden administration's war on red states and our "Neanderthal thinking" rages on. This month, my colleagues and I are fighting Biden and his comrades at the United States Department of Agriculture in court to protect the right of states to run their public schools as they see fit. This time, the fight isn't over curriculum or masking — it's whether states still possess the paltry authority to require boys to use the boys' bathroom at school.

The United States Constitution leaves no doubt as to the states' broad authority over their own public schools, but the Biden administration supposes that everything — even schoolchildren — has a price.

The USDA is the federal agency that directs the myriad "cooperative" federal food programs — including the Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP), the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), and the Child Nutrition Program (including the school-lunch program). These programs both tug at the heart strings and come with a hefty price tag for states, so the Biden administration has found them to be ideal vehicles for forcing genderlessness into our state governments, and more particularly, our public schools.

By issuing a USDA memorandum and accompanying administrative rule, the administration has waged a campaign to impose the left's extremist "gender identity" agenda on schoolchildren with the implied threat that if states resist, their programs and public schools will get less money from the federal government.

It is important to understand how compliance with the left's radical gender identity agenda would destroy the educational experiences of students — girls in particular. The Biden administration's own fact sheet about its guidance indicates that preventing a boy from using the girls' restroom would be discrimination if the boy identifies as a girl. Similarly, the fact sheet suggests that preventing a boy from trying out for the girls' cheerleading squad would be discrimination if the boy identifies as a girl. This is what the left wants to see in Alabama's schools.

Alabama parents — the taxpayers who fund our schools — do not share the Biden administration's goal of genderlessness in our classrooms. That is why the people of Alabama have supported laws that protect girls' sports and girls' bathrooms, as well as laws that prohibit sexual indoctrination in the classroom.

The federal government's ever-increasing control over primary and secondary education offends our American constitutional system. The root cause is coercion through federal funding, upon which states have been far too willing to blindly accept and jealously rely.

The Biden administration's actions seeking to impose the left's gender identity agenda on schoolchildren are illegal and unconstitutional. But even if they were not, and federal funding was at risk, the duty of state leaders is not to dollars. We are meant to serve the interests of the people of our states — and the people of Alabama have clearly spoken, through their elected representatives, that they do not wish for sexual politics to be thrust on their children by the far-left in Washington.

While I hope to preserve every penny of federal funding being threatened by this administration, Alabama's sovereignty is not for sale.