Nineteen Democratic Senators Sign Letter Supporting Title IX Changes Gutting Campus Due Process and Free Speech, and Imposing Gender Ideology
The 19 submitted a comment letter to the Dept. of Ed. praising the Department of Education’s proposed rulemaking. Legal Insurrection Foundation has filed in opposition.
Earlier this week, we wrote that the Biden Administration is seeking to reimpose Obama Administration kangaroo court practices for dealing with sexual harassment charges, and to go them one better in imposing the administration’s ideology of sexual relationships and gender identity. We included a link to Legal Insurrection’s comment letter.
[Click on image to see document.]
The senators think gutting due process rights is a wonderful idea. They wrote:
And we applaud the Department’s proposed rule for removing the DeVos rule’s requirement that colleges and universities have a live hearing with cross-examination for allegation of sexual harassment and have a separate decision maker. The harmful live hearing and cross-examination process, which is wholly unnecessary to determine what happened in a particular incident, re-traumatizes survivors who have already been abused, harassed, and discriminated against and unfairly provides an advantage to the more resourced party.
While the proposed rule eliminates the blanket requirement to have a hearing and live cross-examination, we ask that the Department provide additional guidance on how colleges and universities can minimize reliance on cross-examinations. We ask that the Department outline additional safeguards on how colleges and universities make a credibility determination. In addition, we ask the Department to remove the presumption that the respondent is not responsible for sex discrimination until a determination is made. This presumption is not required in any other type of school proceeding and perpetuates the harmful and false stereotypes that those who report sex-based harassment are being untruthful. (citations omitted)
Simply extraordinary: when evaluating a claim of campus sexual assault–even if there are no witnesses other than the parties–19 Senate Democrats maintain a "live hearing and cross-examination . . . is wholly unnecessary to determine what happened in a particular incident." pic.twitter.com/tuGHfnPajN
— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) September 14, 2022
Got that? Who needs cross-examination and presumption of innocence – they’re harmful to the victim! It reminds me of something Justice Scalia wrote in his Crawford v. Washington opinion:
Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty. This is not what the Sixth Amendment prescribes.
While university administrative proceedings are not state criminal charges, they carry (as we wrote in our comment letter) “high stakes for the accused such as potentially being branded a rapist and expelled from college.” Students facing charges of this nature (especially at public universities) are entitled to due process protections; cross-examination of the complainant and presumption of innocence are essential to that.
The senators also applaud the federal government’s undue intrusion into gender ideology.
We applaud the proposed rule for explicitly stating that discrimination on the basis of sex in education includes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, sex stereotypes, or sex characteristics (including intersex traits), consistent with the interpretation of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock and federal anti-discrimination laws. This explicit inclusion of sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex traits advances the promise of equality for all. We hope the explicit inclusion of LGBTQIA+ students in the Department’s articulation of Title IX’s protections will help address the recent onslaught of discriminatory legislative attacks on transgender and nonbinary students. These efforts range from criminalizing gender affirming care, to banning discussions about LGBTQIA+ identities in schools, to denying trans students access to bathrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identities.
We urge the Department to clarify the scope of prohibited discrimination. Specifically, we recommend the rule address that students must be housed consistent with their gender identity and specify that intentional misgendering is a form of harassment. In doing so, we ask the Department to specify what treatment amounts to a violation of Title IX. We also urge the Department to move forward with proposed rulemaking to address students’ eligibility to participate in athletics. (citations omitted)
In other words, the senators want to force schools to house people with a penis and testicles who “identify” as female in girls’/women’s dormitories. That will be as helpful as Loudon County’s forcing schools to let physiological boys use the girls’ bathroom. Furthermore, they want to force schools to let athletes compete on the team of their choice. You’re physiologically male, and went through puberty as a male? Welcome to the women’s team! Roll over, East German women’s swim team – we’ll do you one better! The senators are also outraged by recent “efforts… criminalizing gender affirming care” – in other words, by efforts to prevent doctors from ripping sexual organs out of minors, or filling their bodies with drugs to prevent them from going through puberty.
Getting back to due process. Perhaps our heroic senators should advise universities in their state to dispense with same whenever they are sued. Take Brown University, for example. On September 9, a student sued the school for suspending him for a semester after what he describes as a sham hearing on a sexual assault charge. The student claimed he wasn’t given cross-examination rights or an impartial factfinder.
Also as related by the student (Brown hasn’t filed any written response), the factfinder concluded that there was no consent at least partly because Smith (the name is an alias) failed to ask the woman every few minutes whether she wanted to continue having sex with him. Imposing sexual mores under the threat of wrong-thinking people being found guilty of sexual assault is precisely what DOE’s proposed rules seem designed to do.
New acc'd student lawsuit against @BrownUniversity: skeptical of bias by inv'r, acc'd student taped his interview–allowing him to show how the inv'r misrepresented him in her report.
(This is the sort of system that the proposed Biden/Lhamon TIX regs seek to restore.) pic.twitter.com/6GCHu1lOCu— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) September 10, 2022
Perhaps Rhode Island’s senior Senator Jack Reed, who co-signed the comment letter, would like to look into the case? Maybe he should explain to Brown that it doesn’t really need a hearing or cross-examination rights? After all, they’re “wholly unnecessary to determine what happened in a particular incident.”
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Comments
Commies are gonna commie.
Marxist Seminaries doing their best to take over with a iron fist
You will never get Satan out of the Congress, particularly the Senate. One thing the founders never thought about was that men would actively seek and obey the great deceiver.
Pervasive, insidious government of perfidy.
Just like the January 6 hearings. What a coincidence.
Democrats overwhelmingly attend Progressive Cults and subscribe to the Pro-Choice ethical religion (i.e. behavioral protocol).
God, how I wish the Founders had put in term limits
Maybe, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here. I see no reason to believe that freshmen senators would be any less likely to sign this letter, or to take these indefensible positions.
Maoists will be Maoists. They’re protecting their indoctrination incubators. Don’t want to distract and confuse their American Red Guard SJW recruits with subversive notions like due process and free speech right before they’re ready to be unleashed on the unwashed racist misogynist White Supremacist enemy.
So many flighty, silly little girls on that list… of both sexes.
“The harmful live hearing and cross-examination process, which is wholly unnecessary to determine what happened in a particular incident”
They’re still butthurt over not being able to railroad Kavanaugh.
“unfairly provides an advantage to the more resourced party.”
Is this another “poor kids are just as smart as white kids” moment?
As to Warren — resting, asleep, awake, or animated, she apparently has no alternative to bitch face. Look at it closely. It’s the face of totalitarian arrogance. You thought Big Brother was bad? Big Sister is way worse.
This is yet another example of the Democrats’ contempt for the Bill of Rights
To be honest, what else can we expect? These are Leftists and anything that guts due process and free speech they will do twice before breakfast.
Subotai Bahadur
Secession – or some form of it – is our only way out.
We do not have to attend their colleges.
We do not have to send our children — especially our sons — to their colleges.
For most young adults who are bright enough to attend college, there are better options.
Amen, Amen! Piss on this renegade government. No free people should have to fear the central government of find themselves with no recourse than to capitulate.
I can think of many reasons why Republicans in both houses need to take back the majority, but of the top 10, this one would be among the top 3, the other two being economy and regulations/inclusive of enforcement of the border and in no particular order. It has to stop moving left before we fail to even recognize our own country.
The repeal of Title IX must happen if it is not to became even more far reaching than the interstate commerce clause. Besides, it is beginning to turn upon those it was intended to protect.
Quoting garbage statistics from a radical far left SJ outfit like Public Justice is the best the Senator’s can do to bolster their argument? What, the DOJ’s numbers didn’t make the case?
Okay, … wait. This is a great article, but I am totally confused by the author’s distinction between Democrats and Socialists. That seems a lot like distinguishing snakes from long reptiles with forked tongues that don’t have legs and slither on the ground. They are both equally snakes.
Totally and utterly disgusting. What they’re doing is erasing the Bill of Rights, and their voters are cheering them on. That is how I know that it is not only the Democrat politicians who are fascists, but that the dimwitted, anti-American scum who vote for them are fascists as well. They are told, maybe not by their media masters, but by us better informed, better educated people, that they’re trashing the rights of Americans… and they don’t care.
I cannot help but think we are in Ante Bellum 2.0. We are in a mortal struggle with people who hate that we have rights and liberty and want to trash the Constitution to take them away from us. They are domestic enemies of the Constitution, and it is time to recognize that fact.
Maybe the d/prog would like to endorse the same lack of neutral fact finder and ability to cross examine witnesses and then apply that to lynch mobs? Either we operate from a presumption of innocence with a process that has safeguards to prevent being railroaded or we don’t.
Maybe these Senators and their media allies would volunteer for the same structures being removed for their kangaroo CT show trials at a later date? It not why not?
Doesn’t anyone get it? This law can be used bi-directionally.
If you’re a man, and become involved in a sexual encounter with a woman, you can accuse her of rape if she fails to check frequently as to whether or not YOU want to continue the encounter.
The same rules of no cross-examination must be used in these cases.
In theory yes, but I suspect it will not work that way in practice. But it will be interesting to see what happens when the man claims to “identify as a woman”. Will the woman be charged with “transphobia”?
Also as related by the student (Brown hasn’t filed any written response), the factfinder concluded that there was no consent at least partly because Smith (the name is an alias) failed to ask the woman every few minutes whether she wanted to continue having sex with him.
I find myself wondering: have the people who come up with these rules ever gotten laid? They seem to have no notion of what actually happens.
Eerily familiar……January 6th committee anyone??