Moms for Liberty seeks order blocking federal LGBTQ school protections nationwide

A Friday filing from the extremist organization seeks a ruling that would block the Biden administration's Title IX rule in more than 850 counties across the U.S.

The far-right extremist group Moms for Liberty on Friday asked a federal judge in Kansas to dramatically expand an order blocking the Biden administration’s new rule aimed at protecting LGBTQ students — seeking to nationalize an injunction issued July 2.

Moms for Liberty asked U.S. District Judge John Broomes, a Trump appointee, to expand his preliminary injunction against the administration’s new rule under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 to cover more than 850 counties across the country — including all 25 of the most heavily populated counties in the nation and all 10 of the largest school districts in the nation.

If the group’s request is granted, the Kansas-based injunction — covered previously at Law Dork — would effectively become a nationwide injunction blocking enforcement of the rule before it is set to go into effect August 1.

The final rule, issued earlier this year, interprets sex under Title IX’s nondiscrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity and changes obligations for addressing sexual harassment complaints, among other elements.

Although the preliminary injunction issued by Broomes on July 2 covered four Republican-led states — Alaska, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming — it also covered members of three organizations that were a part of the lawsuit, including, Broomes wrote, “the schools attended by the children of the members of Moms for Liberty.”

Broomes asked the groups — which also include the “members of Young America’s Foundation or Female Athletes United” — to submit their lists of applicable schools by Monday.

This was a step that I questioned in my report last week due to the fact that Broomes had issued an injunction before he even knew what it covered.

Ten days later, Moms for Liberty proved my point.

In Friday’s filing, Moms for Liberty did not list the schools attended by the children of their members. The group acknowledged that they don’t even know the answer to that question. Citing the “impracticality” of obtaining that information, the group instead asked Broomes to expand the scope of the injunction substantially to include “any K-12 school in any county in which the child of a member of Moms for Liberty resides.”

Moms for Liberty then claimed that it has more than 130,000 members, and provided a list of more than 850 counties in which it claims it has members.

The filing noted that the Justice Department opposes this request and will file its opposition by Sunday.

If granted, the injunction out of Kansas would block enforcement of the rule in all of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, D.C., Detroit, and several other jurisdictions where local and state officials are not seeking such relief — and were not made aware of the fact that their obligations were at issue in the case before Friday.

Moms for Liberty’s claim is that if it has one member who has a child attending a school in Los Angeles Unified School District, the entire district and its more than 1,300 schools should be covered by the injunction issued by a federal district judge in Kansas — regardless of the law affecting such legal questions in California.

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The bigger picture

Broomes’s injunction is not the only injunction against the rule. Two federal judges issued preliminary injunctions blocking enforcement of the rule in a total of 10 states prior to Broomes’s ruling.

Those rulings are on appeal at the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Sixth Circuits, respectively. Justice Department officials are also seeking partial stays of those injunctions — allowing the Education Department to enforce parts of the rule not challenged directly by the plaintiffs in both cases — while the appeals are ongoing.

Additionally, there were two rulings out of Texas on Thursday — one by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in a challenge brought by Texas and two anti-abortion college professors and the other by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in a challenge brought by Carroll Independent School District. Kacsmaryk blocked the rule’s enforcement in Texas, and O’Connor blocked enforcement of part of the rule as to the Texas school district and called for additional briefing about the scope of relief he could offer — suggesting he could, like Broomes, seek to extraterritorially enforce his injunction.

Putting aside for a moment the organization-based injunction issues out of Kansas and scope-of-injunction questions from O’Connor, the Title IX rule is currently blocked in 15 states: Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Law Dork has been covering the challenges to the Title IX rule in depth. Read prior coverage here.