Free Republic

Catherine E. Lhamon is the current Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Despite the unassuming title, her position wields enormous power. The Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, at her sole discretion, can cut off federal funding (and has threatened to do so) from any recipient educational institution she deems unwoke or patriarchal. Lhamon once quipped about how she enjoys carrying the “big stick of the federal government” to further her agenda. Lhamon is best known for abusing her authority to create an illiberal ecosystem of administrative law during the Obama administration, eviscerating due-process...

In July, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) published a 190-page proposal for new rules under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. If passed, the rules would reintroduce Obama-era standards for defining and addressing “sexual harassment,” which means, in practice, restrictive speech codes, proliferating Title IX jobs on the public dime, and campus kangaroo courts. This time, the OCR intends to add a mandatory reporting requirement that would turn teachers and professors into enforcers of an infantilizing sex bureaucracy. The most troubling aspect of the new rules, however, is what they do on the gender-identity...

During the Obama administration, Catherine Lhamon worked in the Department of Education as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. She was known for her hyper-aggressive approach to Title IX. Now she has been nominated by President Biden for her old position. Lhamon’s nomination has stirred up vehement opposition. Her fate now rests in the hands of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, after her nomination deadlocked before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Schumer can file a discharge petition to bring her nomination to the floor, but that would consume valuable time that Senate Democrats might need for other items....

To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms. There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an...