COLUMBUS — Absent action by Congress, state Attorney General Mike DeWine today told the Obama administration he will “vigorously defend the interests” of Ohio against its “heavy-handed” transgender bathroom “edict” to schools.
In a letter, the Republican former U.S. senator said he would fight any attempt to withhold funding from schools that do not allow students to use bathrooms other than facilities that match the gender with which they identify.
RELATED CONTENT: Ohio A.G. Mike DeWine’s letter to Obama administration
“This attempt to nationalize and politicize the way schools address gender identity issues down to the level of school locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms might be dismissed as simple bureaucratic arrogance were it not so potentially harmful to our civic discourage and to the important rights and needs of all the school children involved,” he wrote in a letter to his federal counterpart, Loretta Lynch, and U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr.
“Your assistants apparently have concluded that people of good faith across this country, informed by the basic decency and common sense of their communities, cannot be trusted to work through any particular locker room problems of this sort; instead, the premise of the letter is that local solutions undertaken in good faith must be displaced by edict from Washington, D.C.,” Mr. DeWine wrote.
A multi-state lawsuit was filed earlier this week against the administration, but Ohio is not a party to that litigation. DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney said that remains an option.
“It is our hope, as in the past, that providing comment to the U.S. Department of Justice will hopefully change their position,” he said.
Mr. Tierney said the attorney general, the state’s chief lawyer, sent the letter on his own and was not directed to do so by Gov. John Kasich’s administration or another client.
The letter is a response to the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” directive sent on May 13 to school districts across the country, telling them they must allow transgender students to use facilities that are consistent with their “internal sense of gender.” That would include not forcing them to use individual bathrooms or other facilities separated from other students.
Mr. DeWine challenged the administration’s authority to take any action against an Ohio school that does not comply without congressional action first.
Grant Stancliff, spokesman for the gay rights organization Equality Ohio, said the few schools that have to deal with this issue are already in compliance with the federal directive.
“Ohio doesn’t have a lot of skin in this game…,” he said. “This is in fact what many Ohio schools are already following. We don’t have a bathroom bill like North Carolina that says your birth certificate has to match what bathroom you use. We know the attorney general is considering another statewide race.”
Mr. DeWine has confirmed that he is interested in running for governor in 2018.
First Published May 27, 2016, 4:54 p.m.
