By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – During a press conference held April 29 in the Capitol, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry introduced the state’s Attorney General Liz Murrill who announced that her office had filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration for rule changes that she said “eviscerate Title IX,” referring to a landmark civil rights law that is best known for the protections it provided women in any school or education program that receives federal funds.
“So, here are some of the consequences of the rule,” she explained:
— “Boys and girls will be forced to share bathrooms, locker rooms and perhaps lodging on overnight field trips with members of the opposite sex.
— “They’ll be forced to use the preferred pronouns or face punishment. It raises distinct free speech and free exercise problems.
— “Parents may never hear about unapproved, so-called gender-affirming counseling that their children receive, because the rule allows the school to conceal that information from parents in certain circumstances.
— “Teachers and other school administrators are forced to create and carry out employee training programs on the 423-page rule to change school policies and begin construction on their schools, modifying school bathrooms and locker rooms.
— “Finally, states, education agencies and schools will run into DOE’s coercive power to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding, Louisiana alone is projected to receive $2.6 billion this year– billion.
Murrill also thanked Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga, a Baylor University alum and LSU law school grad, whom she praised for filing the state’s lawsuit “13 minutes” after the Biden administration had dropped its midnight policy change to Title IX.
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State House Speaker Pro Tempore Mike Johnson, a member of First Baptist Church, Pineville, concurrently announced that the Rapides Parish School Board also was suing the Biden administration “to protect our young ladies, our children.”
He said it seemed that the world was “turned upside down.“
“We have gone from shock to anger to resolve that the state of Louisiana, and particularly Rapides Parish, is not going to give way to craziness and is going to represent what’s in the best interest of our children,” Johnson declared.
He added that winning Title IX protections for women had been hard fought just to be “destroyed with the stroke of a pen — not by the legislature, not the Congress, but by the president,”
“So, I am proud to join with our attorney general and Rapides Parish, who will be standing tall with her, to defend the rights of our young ladies and our children.”
Also speaking were Sen. Beth Mizell, a member of First Baptist Church, Franklinton, and Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley, a member of Brookwood Baptist Church, Shreveport.
Mizell, who championed the 2022 Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which became Louisiana law without then-Gov. John Bel Edwards’s signature. The legislation prevents biological males from competing on female-designated sports teams.
She described President Biden as being “retaliatory” in bullying women from seeking Title IX protections which were “adopted to help women overcome insidious discrimination.”
Brumley, meanwhile, called the Biden administration’s actions “a line in the sand issue,” and said the “radical revisions” to Title IX are a challenge to “both common sense and state sovereignty.” He urged school systems across the state to “not comply” with the new rules and to let “this legal process to unfold.”
Other Louisiana lawmakers who were part of the official party, but did not speak, were Sen. Adam Bass, a member of Cypress Baptist Church, Benton, and Rep. Roger Wilder, a member of Hebron Baptist Church, Denham Springs.
Bass is a Senate co-author of 2024 legislation to place the Ten Commandments in Louisiana classrooms. In the House, Wilder is the lead sponsor of the Women’s Safety and Protection Act, which defends women and girls from sexual assault and harassment by banning biological males from female-only spaces and activities.
