Copyright The Oregonian
A federal judge in Eugene Monday night granted a preliminary injunction barring the federal government from halting grant funding for sex education programs that include references to gender identities. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken found the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lacked any grounds to restrict such grant funding and said its new restrictions amounted to sex discrimination. The grants were authorized by Congress to support sex education programs intended to help reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections and adolescent sexual risk behavior based on “medical and social science,” Aiken wrote. Congress also stated the programs must be “culturally specific,” so there’s no grounds for states to remove gender identity references, she wrote in her 77-page ruling. Congress intended for the curriculum to reach “diverse youth audiences,” the judge wrote. The Trump administration’s actions to curtail the grants mark the “opposite” of Congress’ intention, the ruling said. The Human Services agency has no authority to “redefine” what is taught and provided no rational basis for the change, Aiken said. “A curricula that denies the existence of transgender and gender diverse people is not medically accurate and complete,” the judge wrote. While the federal government’s lawyers argued that sex discrimination laws do not apply to federally funded program content, Aiken called that argument “absurd,” in her ruling. “HHS fails to show that the new grant conditions are reasonable, let alone offer any reasonable explanation, other than pretext, for its actions,” Aiken wrote. Assistant U.S. Attorney Susanne Luse had argued that the federal department was seeking to clarify that federal funds must support “medically accurate” sexual education, not “ideological concepts.” The statutes that established the grant-funded programs make no mention of “gender ideology or gender identity,” the federal government argued in court papers. Oregon is one of 16 states and the District of Columbia that sued the federal Human Services department, which has sought to prohibit “gender ideology” lessons funded by the Personal Responsibility Education Program, known as PREP, and Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education program, called SRAE. The federal grants are used to teach about abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The federal department threatened to cut the grant funding by Oct. 27 unless states remove any reference—even a passing one—to inclusive gender identity. The states argued that the new grant conditions that the federal agency is seeking to impose violate federal law, the separation of powers and Congress’ spending power. The termination of funding under the two federal grant programs could have resulted in a loss of at least $35 million to the states, according to their suit.
