AG Ken Paxton
AUSTIN – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined a Tennessee-led multistate letter to President Biden urging him to withdraw new guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regarding “sex discrimination” for schools and programs that receive federal nutritional assistance. This new guidance relies on an unsupportable expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (2020), which interpreted the statutory definition of “sex” in Title VII to include sexual orientation and gender identity. If followed, the guidance would wrongly extend Bostock into the Title IX context—which extension the Supreme Court expressly disclaimed—and impose new and unlawful regulations on state agencies and operators receiving financial assistance through USDA.
“The Biden Administration is attempting to force every state and local entity to adopt its sexual orientation and gender identity agenda—or suffer massive financial consequences,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Bostock was wrong from the start, and any unlawful expansion of it into new areas is doubly wrong. I won’t let Biden’s Department of Agriculture bully Texas into adopting its radical agenda or use kids and school lunch programs as his pawns.”
Read the multistate letter to President Biden here
