This came out of the blue, two Republican governors refused to sign anti-trans legislation, why? Did they see the light?
TWO REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS JUST REFUSED TO JOIN THEIR PARTY’S ANTI-TRANS CULTURE WAR
Utah governor Spencer Cox questioned why “so much fear and anger [has] been directed at so few.”
Vanity Fair
By Caleb Ecarm
March 23, 2022
As Republicans at the state level continue to pass laws that would ban transgender women and girls from participating in girls’ and women’s sports in schools, two GOP governors are refusing the trend by weighing the actual impact instead of simply rubber-stamping the right’s latest culture-war legislation. Utah governor Spencer Cox and Indiana governor Eric Holcomb both vetoed anti-trans sports bills this week that were passed by Republican legislators in their respective states.In a Tuesday letter addressed to the Utah legislature’s GOP leaders, Cox explained his veto of House Bill 11, which would prohibit trans girls from participating in public school sports according to their gender identity, in part by noting that out of the 75,000 high school students who participate sports in Utah, only four are transgender. “Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about,” he said. “Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day.”
After highlighting statistics on the outsized percentage of trans students who attempt suicide, Cox went on to question why “so much fear and anger [has] been directed at so few,” adding, “I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.” The first-term governor concluded by noting that if a veto override does occur, he hopes that Utah Republicans will work to “show these four kids that we love them and they have a place in our state.”
[…]
On Monday, Governor Holcomb wrote his own letter to Indiana’s GOP House Speaker, noting that he had vetoed the state’s anti-trans sports ban, House Enrolled Act 1041, because, among other reasons, the bill seeks to use “government intervention” to solve a virtually nonexistent problem. “It implies that the goals of consistency and fairness in competitive female sports are not currently being met,” Holcomb continued, before asserting that he found no “evidence to support” claims made by the authors of HEA 1041. “Amidst the flurry of enthusiasm to protect the integrity and fairness of women’s sports in our state—a worthy cause for sure—this bill leaves too many unanswered questions,” he concluded.
Who expected this?
I didn’t, all the other governors were champing at the bit to prove how tough they are against little kids but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like what the two governors did, I think it is fantastic!
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As the war against us increases there has been many who question if all these anti-trans bills are legal.
The War on Trans Kids Is Totally Unconstitutional
States do not have a defensible reason for denying children recommended medical care.
Atlantic
By Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr.
May 16, 2021
Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.But even those who are skeptical of today’s gender politics should oppose these laws for another reason: They clearly violate the U.S. Constitution.
[…]
Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected moral disapproval of a particular group of individuals as a constitutionally legitimate basis for imposing targeted legal burdens on the group. Thus, when Congress attempted to, in the Court’s assessment, “prevent so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘hippie communes’ from participating in the food stamp program,” the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ban for otherwise eligible “hippies.” In U.S. Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, decided in 1973, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote, “If the constitutional conception of ‘equal protection of the laws’ means anything, it must, at the very least, mean that a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.”
This bedrock equal-protection principle has endured over time. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained in her concurring opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 decision that invalidated Texas’s ban on same-sex intimacy in private, “Moral disapproval of this group, like a bare desire to harm the group, is an interest that is insufficient to satisfy rational basis review under the Equal Protection Clause.”
[…]
The federal courts should hold that the SAFE Act and all similar state laws lack a legitimate government purpose, meaning that they are unconstitutional. Indeed, a court considering the constitutionality of the SAFE Act need not even decide whether transgender children as a class constitute a “discrete and insular minority” that requires more vigorous constitutional review under the equal-protection clause, because the law is self-evidently irrational, as it lacks any plausible scientific or medical basis and rests on obvious prejudice.
But remember one thing… This Supreme Court doesn’t believe in following precedent.
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Down in Florida the governor signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and you know that this is going to the Supreme Court and I wouldn’t bet that Gov. DeSantis is counting on that.
Florida's anti-gay bill is wrong. It's also unconstitutional.
The extraordinary vagueness of what critics call the "Don't Say Gay" bill could have a chilling effect on the free speech rights of LGBTQ teachers and students.
NBC News
By Daniel Putnam, Furman Scholar at New York University School of Law
March 28, 2022
On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics, HB 1557 contains a crucial provision that may seem harmless on its face — but it undermines the fundamental free speech and due process rights of Florida teachers, students and families.[…]
Let’s take this provision apart. First, it bars classroom instruction “on sexual orientation or gender identity” in K-3 classrooms. Second, this provision bars classroom instruction “on sexual orientation or gender identity” that “is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” without limitation with respect to grade level. Moreover, each of these prohibitions applies to both school personnel and unspecified “third parties.”
On its face, these requirements may seem innocuous. After all, many people might feel some discomfort at the thought of kindergarteners receiving instruction “on sexual orientation.” And who could argue against prohibiting instruction on sexuality — or any topic for that matter — that isn’t “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate”?
[…]
For example, if a teacher who happens to be gay mentions her wife by name when describing what she did with her family over winter break, thereby expressing the fact that she’s married to a woman, does that count as “instructing” students “on sexual orientation”? What if a teacher — gay or straight — assigns a math problem that mentions that “Sally has two moms”? For that matter, if a second grader with two dads draws a picture of her family and shares it with her classmates, does that constitute a “third party” providing the verboten instruction?
But is it legal?
Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court considered another Florida law passed in the context of a moral panic that subjected public school employees to an unconstitutionally vague prohibition. Cramp v. Board of Public Instruction involved a McCarthy-era loyalty oath that required all public employees to swear that one “has not, does not and will not lend aid, support, advice, counsel or influence to the Communist Party.”
[…]
First, they’ve said vague laws deny citizens adequate notice of what conduct will and will not make them vulnerable to legal sanctions. HB 1557’s extraordinary vagueness denies to members of the educational community the “reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited” that due process requires.
Second, vague laws invite arbitrary and discriminatory application. For example, interpreted literally, HB 1557 could be read to prohibit a heterosexual teacher from mentioning her opposite-sex spouse; after all, doesn’t that “instruct” students “on sexual orientation” — namely the teacher’s heterosexuality or the fact of heterosexuality more generally? Yet we can assume straight teachers are less likely to be caught in the crosshairs of HB 1557 than their LGBTQ colleagues.
Third, when vague laws regulate expressive conduct, they have a chilling effect on First Amendment free speech rights. Unsure of what is and isn’t prohibited, teachers and “third parties” alike will “steer far wider of the unlawful zone . . . than if the boundaries of the forbidden areas were clearly marked.”
Okay, the law has weak legs to stand on, but I think that DeSantis will a Supreme Court rejection of the law to complain about an activist court (Even though it is Trump’s court).
All these anti-trans laws are for two purposes and those are votes and campaign donation. As governor Cox said “...so much fear and anger [has] been directed at so few,” adding, “I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.”
The other governors know this but they chose to cause harm for votes and money.
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