Supreme Court Restores Maine Legislator's Voting Rights Pending Outcome of Appeal
The Maine legislature has sought to silence and disenfranchise one of its members due to objections to things she said.
The Maine legislature has sought to silence and disenfranchise one of its members due to objections to things she said.
Earlier this year, state Rep. Laurel Libby made a post criticizing trans women in women's sports. Her refusal to apologize has cost Libby her right to speak on the House floor and vote on legislation.
The federal judge rightly rejects the request.
The bill risks "punishing parents simply for disagreeing with the state's preferred views on gender," Aaron Terr, a First Amendment attorney, tells Reason.
and then lied to parents about what was happening." Because some claims remain undecided in trial court, the court of appeals holds it lacks jurisdiction over the appeal.
The court leaves open, though, the possibility that a narrower challenge aimed just at restrooms with closed stalls, where students wouldn't generally be partly or fully undressed where others can see them.
Across the country, parents of gender-dysphoric kids are confronting state intrusion.
HHS, like all government programs, has plenty of silly and wasteful line items in its budget; there's no need to just make things up.
The president said a Florida school "secretly socially transitioned" a 13-year-old. Emails suggest otherwise.
How well-intentioned laws created new cultural conflicts—and eroded personal liberty
Two new meta-analyses make a case for individualistic approaches to puberty blockers and hormone treatments, driven by patients, parents, and doctors rather than the state.
Like many of his other "Day 1" decrees, the order seems more concerned with scoring points in the culture war than advancing sensible policy.
The chaplain's post "discuss[ed] 'how God designed each person as male or female, and that sex is immutable'" and "stated it is unfair to allow males to compete in women's sports."
"'An ideological preference for characterizing sex as a social construct, a stereotype, and a myth,' she asserts, denies the science of sex differences as well as common sense."
Jesse Singal questions the science of "gender-affirming care."
Did the judge's remarks "suggest[] she had predetermined that the father had no right to oppose gender transition or otherwise direct the child's upbringing based upon his moral and religious beliefs"?
After blaming the state's bathroom law, The New York Times says "it has never been clear" whether gender identity figured in the fight that preceded Nex Benedict's death.
Federal courts continue to be split on this question.
While transgender issues dominated Wednesday's debate, polls suggest that the subject is far from the top of voters' minds.
"Republicans believe in less government, not more," he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill last month that would bar federal agencies from forcing employees to respect preferred names or pronouns.
The court had earlier issued a temporary restraining order against the law, to maintain the status quo; but now that it has gotten more full briefing, it declined to block the law (but also declined to dismiss the challenge to the law).
The sorority, the court held, had a First Amendment freedom of expressive association right to choose which students to admit (logic that suggests that a sorority would equally be free to exclude transgender members).
Langford had been in the news for joining a sorority, which has caused a good deal of controversy at the University of Wyoming.
The decision came despite the applicant's objection, ten months after the name change, that the change was needed to prevent "potential endangerment and/or discrimination through publicly disclosed record of the transgender applicant."
a Sixth Circuit panel concludes (by a 2-1 vote) in staying an injunction against the law pending appeal.
notwithstanding the First Amendment.
Plus: A listener question considers the pros and cons of the libertarian focus on political processes rather than political results.
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