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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Title IX’

Due Process or Transgender Protection on Campus? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 2, 2023

People who oppose due process are opposing common decency in the legal treatment of others. With bitter irony, they do so in the name of protecting the vulnerable—in this case, the gender identified. Anyone who needs protection against common decency and truth is not pursuing justice. They want privilege and power. If the voice of reason can still be heard, people need to hear it now.

https://mises.org/wire/due-process-or-transgender-protection-campus

Wendy McElroy

College campuses have long been battlegrounds between due process for those accused of sexual misconduct (innocent until proven guilty) and legal privileges for alleged victims who many automatically believe (guilty until proven innocent).

The front line is Title IX, the 1972 federal law designed to curb sex discrimination in schools. President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) wants to add gender identity to the mix. The players in this renewed conflict are Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who has introduced a bill to champion due process rights on campus, and Biden’s DOE, who is expanding the definition of discrimination.

The specific issue addressed by the DOE is athletic eligibility. The issue is a political flash point that revolves around the question, “Should transgendered male-to-females compete in women’s sports or is their strength advantage unfair to biological females?” This article examines the competing and overlapping provisions of the draft Title IX regulation, the 2023 draft sports regulation, and Kennedy’s bill.

The Biden executive order 14021 (March 8, 2021) that sparked the current conflict is entitled “Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.” It is a statement of intent. On April 6, 2023, the DOE rolled out an implementation mechanism for the executive order “Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students’ Eligibility for Athletic Teams.”

The language in the 116-page document is confusing and vague, but the core of it redefines terms such as “discrimination” and favorably includes gender identity into the framework for athletic eligibility. The opening summary states that the DOE will “set out a standard that would govern a recipient’s adoption or application of sex-related criteria” that might “limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female athletic team consistent with their gender identity.” This regulation presumes transgendered athletes are able participate in their chosen categories unless the school identifies safety reasons to not allow this.

Backlash from progressives has been swift. The “Proposed Change” is insufficiently protrans, they claim. “These regulations specify methods schools may employ to determine a student’s sex, including invasive physical examinations,” complains the transgender journalist Erin Reed.

Moreover, the DOE document would give school districts the final say on whether injecting gender identity into athletics is problematic. Progressives react with horror. Actually, this is no issue at all. As with past DOE recommendations, schools are likely to over comply not only due to the extreme liberal bias on most campuses but also to avoid a catastrophic loss of federal funds. The “Proposed Change” makes this threat explicitly.

See the rest here

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Biden And Universities Launch Sneak Attack on Free Speech

Posted by M. C. on July 7, 2022

The First Amendment supersedes the authority and whims of the Department of Education.

The First Amendment supersedes the authority and whims of the Department of Education. Remember how the constitution was designed to protect our rights from government encroachment? This is the exact scenario the founders had in mind.

By Cherise Trump
The American Conservative

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/biden-and-universities-launch-sneak-attack-on-free-speech/

The proposed new Title IX regulations by President Biden’s Department of Education have opened the door for universities to restrict and compel student speech even more than they already do. If universities follow these guidelines, students’ First Amendment rights will be jettisoned, rigorous debate will perish, and students’ tuition dollars will be diverted to litigate the free speech issues that will surely arise.

Title IX is a 1972 federal law which bars discrimination based on sex in education. It says that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The law empowers the Department of Education to create federal regulations implementing that directive. These regulations define discrimination “on the basis of sex,” outline how institutions should conduct investigations, and detail how they must treat all parties involved. As with many laws, presidential administrations have historically struggled to balance their federal Title IX regulations with the U.S. Constitution and the principles that govern the American way of life.

The most recent changes to Title IX regulations were made in 2020 to rectify some glaring and obvious shortcomings of previous administrations that raised multiple free speech and due process concerns. The 2020 rules were an important milestone in the history of Title IX because they employed the standard adopted by the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. Under the Davis standard, universities can punish conduct, but they cannot punish pure speech. Schools can only punish expressive activity that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it can be properly viewed as harassing conduct that effectively denies another student access to an education. This standard allows universities to regulate harassment under Title IX while complying with the First Amendment and protecting the rights of their students. Many universities, however, have disregarded the current federal guidelines and created harassment policies that shut down and chill student speech.

Universities have made it increasingly clear that they have an affinity for regulating student speech. Through various policies such as “free speech zones,” bias reporting systems, speech codes, and other restrictions, they have managed to chill student speech to a level we have never seen before. A tactic that often goes overlooked by the public, however, is when colleges and universities use harassment policies to target speech. So, before we discuss how bad it can get with these new Title IX regulations, we should understand how bad it already is.

Two things are currently happening on campuses. First, universities are disregarding the current regulations implemented in 2020. For example, New York University, has thrown out the “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” standard entirely and replaced it with “from the viewpoint of a reasonable person under all the relevant circumstances.” What’s reasonable? What are all the relevant circumstances? Who is to decide? A Diversity Equity and Inclusion administrator who’s paid to find violations?

If they’re not jettisoning Davis entirely, schools are slyly broadening it. The established standard clearly and specifically lays out the key aspects for universities to take into consideration when they are contemplating prosecution of a student for harassment: the objective severity of the incident and whether the incident is taking place often enough to detract from the victim’s education. Universities around the country will often change the “and” to an “or,” like at Yale University.

Language is important when it comes to matters of the law. A simple “and” versus an “or” can change the definition of a sentence entirely. Specifically, the reported incident can either be pervasive, offensive, or severe instead of a combination of all three. Therefore, incidents like microaggressions (which are whatever someone says they are), one-off incidents, offensive jokes, social media banter—all things that do not in actuality, prevent equal access to education—could be punished by the university and leave a black mark on a student’s permanent record.

The second and more explicit action we are seeing from universities, is their creation and enforcement of additional harassment policies which target constitutionally protected speech listing overbroad and subjective examples of what harassment is. There is no federal standard for the number of harassment policies universities can have. Therefore, many of them have implemented their Title IX policies while tacking on other “harassment” policies that target whatever they want. Oftentimes, these are lumped in with their sexual harassment policies and labeled “other forms of harassment,” like at Tulane University, but sometimes they are separate “discriminatory harassment” policies or “anti-harassment” policies that are included on their Title IX website or adjacently to their Title IX policies in their student handbook.

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Dubious Domination – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on July 11, 2019

So rather than ape the NFL and NBA leagues, women’s sports would be better advised to adopt the barnstorming model of tennis and golf in which all the stars come to your city at once, but only a single time per year.

https://www.takimag.com/article/dubious-domination/print

by Steve Sailer

Why has the American national women’s soccer team won its version of the World Cup four times, while our national men’s team hasn’t made it past the quarterfinals since 1930?

It’s not that the American women are better in an absolute sense than the American men. In 2017, for example, the U.S. women’s team was beaten 5–2 by a team of Dallas boys no older than age 15. But Americans aren’t sophisticated enough soccer fans to notice how much worse the quality of play is in women’s soccer than in men’s soccer.

No, America dominates women’s soccer for the same reason South Korea dominates women’s golf: because nobody else has much cared.

Success in women’s golf is largely a Social Construct of how much fathers want their daughters to win at golf. Right now, Korean dads obsess over that much more than do American or Australian dads.

Women’s golf has been hugely fashionable among Koreans for the past 20 years, so at present 12 of the top 20 ranked women in the world are South Koreans or from the Korean diaspora. Korea now has so many professional women golfers and so few surnames to go around that the No. 7 ranked player in the world is officially known as Jeongeun Lee6, because she is the sixth Korean lady golf pro named Jeongeun Lee.

In contrast, the highest-ranked Korean man is American Kevin Na at No. 32.

Why the difference? Because success in women’s sports is extremely socially constructed. After the part-Asian Tiger Woods’ triumph in 1997 and Se Ri Pak’s victory in the 1999 U.S. Women’s Open, Korean tiger parents fell in love with the idea of molding their children into golf prodigies…

Women’s soccer in America is a bit like women’s golf in South Korea, although its rise was less organic and more bureaucratic. The 1972 Title IX legislation mandated equal treatment of male and female college athletes, even though guys are clearly more sports-crazed. It’s hard to come up with sports that coeds care much about, so soccer has prospered by default as perhaps their least unfavorite team sport…

America’s 9,383 Division I soccer scholarships are an enormous financial investment in women’s soccer, especially considering that the rest of the world doesn’t have college women’s soccer scholarships, or college soccer, or, until recently, women’s soccer.

The American system of training soccer players, boys and girls, via playing numerous 11-on-11 games in the hope of winning a college scholarship and then turning pro at age 22 isn’t terribly effective at creating male world-class soccer stars.

Instead, the proven methods for thriving in the men’s World Cup are the Brazilian—let slum youths kick a soccer ball all day as they play hooky—and the Dutch—enroll the best 7- and 8-year-old boys in an intensive academy owned by a major-league team.

The most famous soccer academy is likely Ajax in Amsterdam, where Johan Cruyff, possibly the most influential player ever, was trained. The modern style of “Total Football” was largely perfected by Ajax about 50 years ago.

Handpicked boys go to school in the morning and train at Ajax in the afternoon for free (unlike the pay-for-play model that keeps soccer highly middle-class in the U.S.). If the Dutch lads become professional-quality, Ajax can sell their contracts for tens of millions.

The Dutch apprentices seldom play 11-on-11 games because games don’t provide them with enough touches of the ball. Instead, to maximize touches, they drill one-on-one constantly under scientific coaching.

The Dutch system chews up and spits out countless boys who aren’t quite good enough, but it does produce great players. The Dutch have made three World Cup finals, despite a population of only 17 million.

American soccer kids, in contrast, play huge numbers of 11-on-11 games, which are fun and healthy (but can wear out joints, especially on girls). But the genteel American style of training leaves their skills rudimentary compared with the drilled Europeans. Moreover, our main goal is a college scholarship, which Europeans find bizarre: A true talent would be playing professionally as a late teen…

Sure, America has more popular indigenous sports that absorb much of our huge population’s talent. But most of our homegrown sports are biased toward the tall, while soccer could be a good fit for the half of the population that is below average in height.

On the other hand, the American system of soccer, with its team spirit and college orientation, is probably better preparation for life for the majority of players who won’t become pros.

Yet the much-criticized American system works fine for training World Cup-winning women, simply because the rest of the world hasn’t cared much about women’s soccer.

For instance, the third-best record in the history of the women’s World Cup, after the U.S. and Germany, belongs to tiny Norway (population 5 million) due to the traditional lack of effort made by men’s soccer superpowers like Italy and Argentina, neither of which have ever made it to the women’s final four…

It’s easy to mock the capsule narratives the networks come up with to hook women viewers—“After her heartbreaking loss four years ago, she put her dream of starting a family on hold for four years to rededicate herself to America winning today. But, just last week, her beloved grandmother died and…” Yet that kind of narrative is, objectively, far more compelling than the monotony of a professional league season.

So rather than ape the NFL and NBA leagues, women’s sports would be better advised to adopt the barnstorming model of tennis and golf in which all the stars come to your city at once, but only a single time per year.

Rather than divvy the national team’s stars out among different cities, keep the U.S. team together and have it tour the country playing every Sunday against a squad of foreign all-stars with some sinister un-American name, such as Team Putin.

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Democrats’ passage of “Equality Act” is the first stage in their attempts to CRIMINALIZE Christianity and throw all practicing Christians in prison (while banning their speech) – NaturalNews.com

Posted by M. C. on May 24, 2019

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-05-22-democrats-passage-of-equality-act-attempts-to-criminalize-christianity.html

(Natural News) One of the first things Americans need to understand about Democrats is that virtually every piece of legislation they propose is misnamed.

For instance, Obamacare — officially called “The Affordable Care Act” — made healthcare unaffordable for millions of Americans and far more expensive than it previously was for tens of millions more.

And the recently-passed “Equality Act” is not about ‘equal rights.’ It is actually about creating inequality among Americans by conveying extra rights onto a small subset of people who are already protected under the civil rights laws…at the risk of rights of the vast majority of all other Americans.

Last week, all Democrats in the Dem-controlled House, along with eight Republicans, voted in favor of the Equity Act. By a vote of 236-173, the act, if it passes the Senate and is signed by POTUS Trump (neither of which seems likely), will “broaden the definition of protected classes to include sex, sexual orientation and gender identity,” according to a tweet from Roll Call.

As reported by TownHall, if a person only read the title of the legislation, passage would seem like a shoe-in. But once you dig deeper into the bill, as many Republicans did, you discover:

The legislation would add sexual orientation and gender identity to characteristics protected by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. To Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the bill is “a top priority because equality for the LGBTQ community is a top priority” for the party.

The GOP disagrees, however. The bill will mandate “top-down, government-led discrimination against all Americans who hold a differing view of human sexuality and gender,” Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) said at a press conference on Thursday.

Thus, a vote for the act “is a vote against parents, it’s a vote against women, it’s a vote against doctors, it’s a vote against educators, it’s a vote against children.”…

It also ensures that American taxpayers foot the bill for these abortions by effectively eliminating Hyde protections…

This bill does NOT promote ‘equality’

Not only that, but, according to The National Sentinel, the Equality Act would decimate high school sports, at least for girls, after women’s rights groups fought for decades to prohibit discrimination against female sports programs under a series of early 1970s-era civil rights laws that included Title IX.

The act would require high schools to allow biological males to compete on girl’s teams if they ‘identify’ as a female and are in the process of becoming a transgendered person.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced an amendment at the last minute to the Equality Act that would have preserved Title IX’s protections for female sports teams, but Democrats — the ‘party of women’ — rejected it soundly.

“Democrats patently do not care about preserving all-female competition at the high school level that was hard-fought and hard-won nearly a half-century ago, choosing to toss them away for the short-term political benefit of ‘protecting’ perhaps less than one-half of one percent of the U.S. population,” notes The National Sentinel…

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Go Back To Sleep - Your Government Is In Control! by scart ...

 

 

 

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