Biden Education Department Proposes Title IX Regulation That Would Restrict Free Speech

Biden Education Department Proposes Title IX Regulation That Would Restrict Free Speech

When it comes to education, Biden’s presidency really is like a third term for Obama.

Liberty Unyielding reports:

Education Department proposes Title IX regulation to restrict free speech

The Biden administration has just proposed a Title IX regulation that would redefine sexual harassment more broadly in schools and universities, to restrict speech that some courts have ruled is protected by the First Amendment. The new definition would discard the current definition used by the Education Department, which is based on a 1999 Supreme Court decision.

Right now, campus speech — such as discussion of sexual issues — is not harassment just because it is “pervasive” — as all widely-held viewpoints about sex and gender are. The speech must also be “severe,” such as calling a woman a gender-based epithet.

That would change under the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX regulation, however. Under it, speech would only need to be “pervasive” or “severe” to violate Title IX. So even viewpoints that are mildly offensive to progressive civil rights bureaucrats could contribute to a Title IX violation if they are persistent on campus, and thus are viewed by a civil-rights bureaucrat as “pervasive.” And comments by different students could apparently be lumped together in finding that the comments collectively amount to harassment, even if each individual comment is mild and not intended to harass. For example, the Biden administration says that “even if” a behavior by one student is “infrequent” and does not constitute harassment by itself, that same” behavior “by different students in each class throughout the day may” qualify as harassment.

The Biden administration’s proposed regulation uses a definition of sexual harassment that is similar to one that was struck down by the federal appeals court in Atlanta. That court struck down as a violation of the First Amendment a harassment policy at the University of Central Florida that defined harassment to include “verbal” conduct that was “so severe or pervasive that it unreasonably interferes with, limits, deprives, or alters the terms or conditions of education … or participation in a university program or activity,” in Speech First v. Cartwright (2022) (emphasis added).

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