Advancing American Freedom led a coalition of 55 other amici in fighting for the fundamental right of all parents to protect their children from being exposed to sexually explicit material in schools. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the School Board introduced more than 20 pro-LGBT books to the English curriculum for elementary school students. While state law gives parents a right to be notified and opt their children out of sex education materials they find objectionable, there is no equivalent law protecting parents against indoctrination in the English curriculum. Along with the books, teachers were instructed to answer student questions with canned responses including that telling elementary school students that “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender,” that “Our body parts do not decide our gender,” and that “When someone tells us what our gender is, we believe them.”  A religiously diverse group of parents thus sued to protect their children from being exposed to such pernicious lies.

AAF filed an amicus brief supporting these parents for the second time, now at the Supreme Court, asking the Court to take up the case and protect the fundamental right of parents around the country to direct the upbringing of their children.

“Parents send their children to school expecting them to learn. They do not send them to school to be indoctrinated into novel ideologies,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “For decades, in the death grip of the teachers unions, public schools have repeatedly failed to teach our children reading and math at grade level. Now, schools are junking up curricula with ideologies that reject basic reality. The brave parents in this case are rightly standing up and fighting back.”

Read the full brief here.

Advancing American Freedom continues its fight to tether Washington bureaucrats to reality, filing comments challenging a new proposed rule from Department of Health and Human Services that is an omnibus of absurdity.  The rule helpfully provides a list of the pronouns that might need to be recorded including ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself, co/co/cos/cos/coself and, reflecting the ups and downs of life, yo/yo/yos/yos/yoself.

“The federal bureaucrats at HHS should stop playing ideological yo-yo and focus on improving healthcare worthy of a free people that provides for greater evidence-based treatment, access, and safety,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “If the regulators who drafted this proposed rule want to live in a fantasy world, they can leave HHS and find like-minded individuals in some online world. But so long as they make rules that will affect healthcare for all Americans, they must focus on real people in the real world.”

Read the full comment here.

Advancing American Freedom continues its fight against the Biden-Harris Administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX, leading a coalition of 41 other amici in an amicus brief in Rapides Parish v. Department of Education. Following the disappointing reasoning of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Department of Education issued a regulation reinterpreting Title IX’s protections against sex discrimination to fancifully include discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Several cases around the country, including Rapides Parish, are challenging this abandonment of reality. While the rule claims not to apply to sports, its logic basically destroys distinctions between men and women wherever Title IX applies. And the numbers don’t lie. Women and girls need sports and private spaces from which men are excluded. Finally, lurking in the background of the gender debate is the horrifying issue of puberty blockers for children.

“One of the fundamental questions for policy makers and judges is whether we will have laws that comport with reality or not,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “When law and policy try to govern the world as bureaucrats or politicians wish it were, rather than as it actually is, people are inevitably hurt in the process. AAF intends to stand for the truth for its own sake and for all those who will suffer if America fails to live in reality.”

Read the full brief here.