If you thought Common Core represented radical educational policy, you will be doubly outraged by how Obama’s Department of Education is pushing the boundaries on radical social policy.
This week, federal education bureaucrats here in Washington informed an Illinois school district that it had violated the rights of a transgendered student. The person in question is biologically male, but mentally perceives himself as a girl and has demanded the right to use all the female facilities at his high school.
The school district did everything it could to reasonably accommodate these demands, but drew the line at the girls’ locker rooms and showers. For the Obama Administration, that was not good enough. It has given the school district 30 days to surrender or lose federal funding.
Let me repeat that: The bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are threatening to harm all the students in a school system unless the school district caves in to the extreme demands of one “transgendered” student.
I’m curious: How many parents would vote to let boys use the girls’ bathrooms or showers?
As one Illinois official recently explained, “The students in our schools are teenagers, not adults. . . Boys and girls are in separate locker rooms — where there are open changing areas and open shower facilities — for a reason.”
Our D.C. overlords evidently don’t care about the privacy rights of the other female students. At this point, parents should be reaching for their proverbial pitchforks and torches.
I am dumbfounded by the passive response of many GOP leaders. This bureaucratic overreach in service to a radical social policy is outrageous!
It wasn’t that long ago when Republicans demanded that the federal Department of Education be abolished. If there was ever a cause that justified the decentralization of power, of reining in rogue government, this is it!
Gary L. Bauer served in President Ronald Reagan’s administration for eight years, as Under Secretary of Education and as President Reagan’s Chief Domestic Policy Advisor.
