BATON ROUGE – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced he would vigorously defend the state and its citizens from unlawful action threatened by the Obama Administration’s recent mandate that public schools allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex.
In a letter to the leaders of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Board of Regents, Louisiana High School Athletic Association, Louisiana School Boards Association, Louisiana Community and Technical College System Board, and Office of Juvenile Justice – Landry asserted the administration’s threat to remove the state’s Title IX monies jeopardizes the safety of the student body and creates a public education funding crisis.
“Let me be perfectly clear, President Obama and his appointees do not have legal authority to require our children to share locker rooms and bathrooms with children of the opposite sex,” wrote Landry. “The administration’s interpretation of Title IX constitutes an improper attempt to commandeer state-owned property in pursuit of a federal policy that has uniformly been rejected by the federal courts.”
“The policy position adopted by the Obama Administration irresponsibly creates an environment in which children may be more easily exposed to sexual predators,” continued Landry. “Furthermore, these irresponsible and illegally promulgated rules place the mental well-being and privacy rights of ninety-nine percent of Louisiana’s children at risk without any demonstrable evidence of benefit to the less than one percent of the population this policy purports to benefit.”
“While there are opportunities for state lawmakers, school districts, athletic associations, and colleges and universities to address complex student safety issues in a nondiscriminatory manner – this mandate and threat of lawsuits and withholding of education funding is not a proper or legal approach,” Landry wrote.
Read the full copy of this letter from Attorney General Jeff Landry.
