Texas is suing Obama for supporting transgender rights
The state of Texas has launched legal proceedings against the President over transgender bathrooms.
The Obama administration has intervened on LGBT rights this month after a string of laws attempted to roll back LGBT discrimination protections, purportedly to stop trans people from going to the bathroom.
The federal government wrote to every school in the US to advise them that they are obliged not to discriminate against trans people.
However, that hasn’t gone down well with hard-right Republicans – with GOP politicians in Oklahoma attempting to impeach Obama.
Right-wing leaders in Texas are taking a different tactic however: launching the latest in a long, long string of lawsuit against the federal government.
KHOU reports that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will today file a legal challenge against President Obama’s directive on transgender issues.
Paxton is set to make the announcement in Austin Wednesday afternoon, according to the outlet.
The news was confirmed by the state’s Governor Greg Abbott, who bizarrely pre-empted Paxton’s press conference by tweeting: “Texas will sue to stop Obama’s transgender directive to schools. Thanks @KenPaxtonTX”.
Republican previously took aim at his ‘unconstitutional’ intervention on the issue.
The Oklahoma impeachment motion says: “The members of the United States House of Representatives elected from this state are hereby requested to file articles of impeachment against the President of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States, the Secretary of Education and any other federal official liable to impeachment who has exceeded his or her constitutional authority with respect to the letter referenced in this resolution, based upon the grounds that the Constitution of the United States does not grant the executive branch of the federal government any authority whatsoever over the public education system, nor over the use of restrooms or other facilities thereof.”
Asked about the row previously, Obama press secretary Josh Earnest mocked the tendency of some Republicans to sexualize the issue.
He said: “I noticed that the [Wall Street Journal] noted that somehow Democrats appeared to be obsessed with sex, which I thought was a rather amusing observation on their part because it’s Republicans who have, for example, passed this HB2 law in North Carolina.
He added: “This is a confrontation that Republicans have sought out, rather cynically, because they are seeking a political advantage. So it’s the Republicans in the North Carolina legislature, for example, that convened a one-day special session to ram through HB2, the now infamous HB2 in North Carolina so that it could be quickly passed in both houses of the legislature and then signed into law by the governor of that state.
“They have since walked back some aspects of that bill in the face of significant criticism, particularly from the business community, and it’s clear that it’s had a negative impact on the economic climate in North Carolina.”
He added: “The comments that we’ve seen from Republicans in other places I think makes clear that they’re not really interested in helping schools across the country confront what is a difficult policy challenge; they’d rather just cynically try to appeal to people’s fears in order to try and gin up political support for their campaigns.
“And that’s not the approach that the administration is taking, and in fact, I think this was evident from the guidance that was issued by the Department of Education on Friday, that in response to specific requests from school administrators across the country, the Department of Education put forward best practices and good ideas with regard to how schools can implement this policy in a way that will protect the dignity and safety of every student at the school.
“And these weren’t just ideas that were developed by administrators in Washington, D.C. — these are actually ideas that were developed by school administrators across the country who had found workable solutions that could be successfully applied in their schools. And sharing those ideas with school administrators across the country is a tangible, constructive offer of assistance that I think the majority of school administrators appreciated.
“And that’s not the kind of constructive contribution that we’ve seen from conservatives. From conservatives, you basically have seen the suggestion that they don’t really have a way of — they haven’t really put forward a specific suggestion for how they believe that the rules should be applied.
“The best that they seem to have come up with is suggesting that birth certificates should be examined before anyone can enter a public bathroom. So that doesn’t make sense. That certainly is an indication that they are much more interested in politics than they are in actually trying to solve the problem.”
