Five U.S. Supreme Court justices agreed to continue a stay on the U.S. Department of Education’s new Title IX changes reaffirming a lower court's decision. The rule expanded the landmark 1972 civil rights protection to include LGBTQ+ students.
The dispute between the justices — just as within the appellate court — doesn’t appear to be over whether to block the most contentious parts of the rules. Those would have expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include general identity and sexual orientation.
“Importantly,” the majority wrote, “all Members of the Court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination.”
The Supreme Court ordered the stay for 10 states, including Kentucky, combining two different lawsuits to do so. The rule, which was initially supposed to go into effect on August 1 before the start of the school year, won’t be implemented in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho as the case progresses.
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, granted an expedited hearing for the case and oral arguments are scheduled for October.
In a statement, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said that public and private schools across the state received $1.1 billion in federal education department funding last year. Schools risk losing their federal funding if they violate Title IX rules.
“We went to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend equal opportunities for Kentucky’s women and young girls. At its core, this is a fight for common sense itself. And we’ve won at every level of our judicial system,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman.
Kentucky Sen. Robby Mills from Henderson said the ruling “condemns the woke ideology” he says the Biden administration has promoted.
"Wokeism and gender ideology must never trump Kentucky values and the U.S. Constitution," Mills said.
Four of the nine justices dissented against the opinion however, with former President Donald Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the three liberal-leaning justices. The dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued that the stay was overly broad and shouldn’t apply to the whole of the new rule.
Along with expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students, the rule change would have also further shielded pregnant students from discrimination. It would have rolled back changes put in place by the Trump administration that narrowly defined sexual harassment and allowed people accused of sexual harassment or assault to cross-examine their accusers in live hearings.
“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 wrote in her dissent.
But the majority of justices decided that the new definition of sex discrimination in particular was too overarching and therefore was impossible to disentangle from the rest of the rule.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
