In a 2-1 ruling, the court ruled that the law violated Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in schools.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a West Virginia law that banned transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
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A lawsuit filed against a hospital for not providing transgender medical procedures could signal a new approach for LGBTQ activists to try to force medical professionals to affirm gender transitions, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Feb. 14 on behalf of 18-year-old Caden Kent, a biological female patient identifying as transgender, arguing that the hospital’s policy violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by not providing a sex-change mastectomy. Legal experts who spoke to the DCNF said this argument may come up in more cases as hospitals are penalized for refusing to provide sex-change procedures, and may make it as high as the Supreme Court in time.
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A federal agency is working with left-of-center nonprofits to increase voting among prisoners and former prison inmates under an executive order from President Joe Biden designed to increase election turnout.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has partnered with and regularly consults on voting issues with the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.
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Former President Donald Trump promised to appeal a gag order reimposed on him Sunday night by the judge overseeing his 2020 election case.
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A federal judge ruled Friday that Kentucky can enforce its state law which prohibits sex change treatments for minors, according to Reuters.
U.S. District Judge David Hale, an Obama appointee, decided that Kentucky can prohibit the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors after ruling in June that the state law likely violated the U.S. Constitution, according to Reuters. The decision was made because a federal appeals court reinstated a similar ban in Tennessee ahead of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing both state’s cases together.
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At least 20 states have either restricted or banned transgender procedures for minors, with many of them facing lawsuits and temporary blocks by courts as a result, while future litigation is possible in states considering adopting such laws.
The states that have enacted legislation against such procedures are: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia – essentially all conservative-leaning.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem) is drafting a bill to ensure voters have their in-person votes counted in cases when their defective mail-in ballots were tossed.
Boscola sponsored Act 77, the 2019 law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, and her emerging bill seeks to clarify a part of that statute. A provision in that law led the Delaware County Board of Elections to vote unanimously on May 23 to throw out six of its eligible voters’ ballots cast in the May 16 primary. Three of those voters are now suing the board in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas to have their votes tallied and to guarantee those in similar situations have their ballots counted in the future.
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State courts are quickly becoming a heated battleground for abortion and LGBT issues, with left-leaning groups announcing legal strategies focused on the state level and launching efforts to educate the public on their role in electing local judges.
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Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles on Wednesday responded to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s withdrawal from their scheduled University of Pittsburgh debate, calling the libertarian economist “scared” and “not honest.”
The event, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), was to take place next Tuesday and Knowles said he and ISI are looking for a replacement for McCloskey. Knowles, a traditionalist Catholic, and McCloskey, a transgendered woman and professor emerita at the University of Illinois-Chicago, planned to argue over the nature of womanhood and current gender-policy issues.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit Thursday against a Pennsylvania school district after they allegedly revoked permission for The Satanic Temple (TST) to host an After-School Satan Club on the district’s property, according to a press release.
Saucon Valley School District (SVSD) reportedly denied a request by TST’s club to use school facilities after receiving calls and messages from concerned members of the district, according to the lawsuit. TST argues in the lawsuit that denying its club is a violation of the First Amendment when another religious club is allowed to use school facilities but the After-School Satan Club is not.
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After two Pennsylvania lawmakers last week called for cancelling upcoming conservative appearances at the University of Pittsburgh, a politically diverse array of voices are responding in favor of free speech.
Representatives Jessica Benham (D-Carrick) and Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia), who co-chair the state House LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, denounced the state-related university for permitting the presence of speakers who oppose liberal views of transgenderism. The guests they find objectionable include Cabot Phillips, senior editor of the The Daily Wire news organization, who is scheduled to speak this Friday; Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and critic of biological males competing in women’s sports, who will appear on March 27; and Michael Knowles, a Daily Wire commentator, who will debate transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey on April 18. All speakers are being sponsored by student-led associations.
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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court this week ordered counties to decline to count any absentee or mail-in ballot delivered in an undated envelope.
State law, which has permitted no-excuse absentee voting since 2020, requires those not voting in person to place their ballot into a secrecy envelope before placing it into a return envelope. Voter must sign and date that outer envelope for their ballot to be valid under state statute.
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Oklahoma officials are calling for teachers pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) to leave the classroom after an Oklahoma teacher spoke out against the states’ education law following her resignation.
Summer Boismier quit her high school teaching position at Norman Public Schools in Norman, Oklahoma, after she shared a QR code in her classroom linking students to “Books Unbanned,” a program through Brooklyn Public Library, that allowed students to access books prohibited from being taught by a state law. The law, HB 1775, prohibits teaching that one race or sex is superior to another, with the intent to prevent the teaching of CRT and certain elements of gender ideology.
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Pennsylvania state Reps. Craig Williams (R-Chadds Ford) and Chris Quinn (R-Media) on Friday lauded area lawmakers and activists for their work toward enactment of “Deana’s Law” which toughens drunk-driving sentences.
The new act is named after Deana DeRosa Eckman, a 45-year-old Delaware County resident who died in a February 2019 car collision caused by six-time Driving-Under-the-Influence (DUI) offender David Strowhouer in Upper Chichester Township. Strowhouer had a blood-alcohol content of 0.199, more than twice the level the commonwealth permits, and was driving 80 miles per hour before striking Eckman’s vehicle head-on.
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The Arizona affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion Saturday that seeks to block the state’s “personhood” law which, they argue, could make all abortions illegal in the state.
The abortion rights groups filed an emergency motion one day after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, returning decisions about abortion to the states.
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The American Civil Liberties Union hosted a podcast earlier this month in which a man who identifies as non-binary, Alok Vaid-Menon, argued that society should discard the “gender binary.” People who do not affirm transgender and non-binary identity, the mixed-media artist and activist argued, are acting out of grief over being forced by society to be either masculine or feminine.
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Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz exposed the identity behind the “Libs Of TikTok” Twitter account in an article that widely characterized exposure of questionable school policy and problematic teacher-student interactions as “anti-LGBT.”
Rather than grapple with the issues the account brought to light — some of which resulted in discipline of teachers — Lorenz drew on interviews from left-wing activists at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the left-wing organization Media Matters, who predictably supported the narrative that exposing controversial classroom instruction to the public at large essentially amounts to bigotry for the transgender and gay community.
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A federal appeals court this week blocked certification of the election results for the contest between Republican David Ritter and Democrat Zachary Cohen for Lehigh County, Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas Judge.
Currently, Ritter is 74 votes ahead of Cohen, but the win would flip to the Democrat should the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decide to count 257 absentee ballots that lack handwritten dates on their return envelopes. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania is litigating on behalf of five of the voters who cast those ballots.
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The U.S. Capitol Police is running background checks and examining the social media histories of people meeting with lawmakers, Politico reported Monday.
Following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, the Capitol Police adopted a new policy to dig into the social media feeds of individuals meeting members of Congress, Politico reported, citing three people familiar with the matter as well as internal Capitol Police documents and communications. Targets of the surveillance included congressional staffers as well as lawmakers’ constituents, donors and associates.
Julie Farnam, acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police and former Department of Homeland Security official, directed analysts to run “background checks” on donors and associates of lawmakers, including instructions to “list and search all political opponents to see if they or their followers intend to attend or disrupt the event,” according to documents reviewed by Politico.
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Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court is expected to soon issue a decision on whether the state Senate Republicans’ 2020 election probe may continue.
Specifically, the judges must determine whether delivery of information subpoenaed by the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee would breach voters’ privacy rights as state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) and other plaintiffs maintain.
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