US DOE: Supreme Court’s Title VII decision doesn’t change CT’s violation of Title IX

 

The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Christiana Holcomb regarding the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ revised letter of impending enforcement action issued Monday that informs the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference that the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding Title VII does not change the agency’s determination that the conference is violating Title IX in allowing males to compete in girls’ sports:

“The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision concerning a completely separate law cannot be manipulated to mean that girls should be reduced to spectators in their own sports. The OCR’s revised letter, which represents a formal statement of the agency’s position, rightly recognizes this. Among other things, the Supreme Court expressly stated that it was not ruling on any law outside of Title VII and the questions surrounding it, which are entirely different than the questions involved in this situation, where physiological differences between athletes remain clearly relevant. If anything, that ruling only reinforces the binding nature of Title IX, as the OCR revised letter explains. In short, no credible legal argument can be made to push girls off of the winners’ podium in their own sports. Males will always have inherent physical advantages over comparably talented and trained girls; that’s the reason we have girls’ sports in the first place.”

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys asked DOE to investigate in June 2019 and filed the lawsuit Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut the following February.

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.