When the Los Angeles Superintendent of Schools applauded Democrat President Barack Obama’s demand that schools honor transgender bathroom rules, she knew the original authority came from Republicans: former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former President George W. Bush.
The principal architect for mainstreaming the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender and Questioning (LBGTQ) agenda in the United States was former California Democrat State Senator, now L.A. County Supervisor, Sheila Kuehl. Her training as a lawyer and professor of law at UCLA, Loyola Marymount, and USC gave her the foundation to completely transform California law.
In 2007, Kuehl introduced Senate Bill 777, which restated the concept of sex under California Education Code 210.7:
Gender means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression. “Gender expression” means a gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with a person’s assigned sex at birth.
Although California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had opposed four similar LBGTQ bills when he was running for reelection in 2006, he signed virtually identical bills in October 2007, effective beginning January 1, 2008.
One of those bills was AB 394, which targeted and teachers for “anti-harassment training.” Essentially, the bills banned anything in public schools that could be interpreted as a negative micro-aggressions toward homosexuality, bisexuality and liberal alternative lifestyles. That included references to “Mom and Dad” as well as “husband and wife.”
The bill offered no protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, making it discriminatory for a teacher or parent to interfere with a boy going into girls’ bathroom, or visa versa.
Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute at the time, warned: “Because no textbook or instruction in California public schools currently disparages transsexuality, bisexuality, or homosexuality, the practical effect of SB 777 will be to require positive portrayals of these sexual lifestyles at every government-operated school.”
Once California, the largest textbook market in the nation, adopted SB 777 standards, national publishers dutifully rewrote history and psychology to conform to California law.
SB 777 language was so broad that it inadvertently became a “legal defense argument” against prosecution for sex offenders and child pornography. (Later, SB 777 was amended by SB 145 in 2013 to address pedophilia.)
Until Democrat President Lyndon Johnson passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the responsibility for K-12 education clearly rested with the states under the U.S. Constitution.
ESEA was meant to supplant state control, and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, passed by President Bush, not only reauthorized ESEA, but the law took the huge step of giving authority to the federal government to “raise achievement for all students” and to “close the achievement gap in all U.S. schools through accountability, research-based instruction, flexibility and options for parents.”
On Friday, the May 13, the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Education Office for Civil Rights jointly issued “federal guidance on Title IX” stating that schools, colleges and universities must provide a safe and supportive environment treatment for transgender students.
But then President Obama leveraged Executive Branch authority under the federal mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act to issue letters to all 13,506 school districts and 178 state-dependent school systems, warning them to open their bathrooms to Lesbian, Gay Bi-sexual, Transgender and Questioning students or risk losing their part of the $154 billion in federal funding for schools.