The Biden administration is holding lunch money for schools hostage to secure concessions on LGBT issues, conservative advocacy group Fight for Schools said.
Schools receiving federal money under the Food and Nutrition Service are now required to investigate allegations of what the Biden administration considers to be “discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation,” the Department of Agriculture announced in a May 5 news release.
The USDA will require those schools to change their “non-discrimination policies and signage” to include bans on what the Biden administration considers “discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation,” the news release stated.
The agency would also expect schools that receive federal money for school lunches to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of the opposite sex, Fox News reported.
“What you’re seeing here is really the Biden administration saying ‘you’re going to do what I want or I’m going to take your lunch money,’” Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News.
“For the federal government to come in and really tie school nutrition and school lunch programs to this radical ideology is terrifying, and it’s appalling.”
“They discuss equity nonstop in the Biden administration,” Prior said. “But in reality, if you want to talk about equity or equal opportunity, the best way to do that is to make sure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.”
“One way to do that is to make sure that they are properly fed,” Prior added.
The Food and Nutrition Service is a federal agency under the USDA tasked with helping administer domestic nutrition assistance and food security programs nationwide.
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School lunches under the National School Lunch Program, which helps low-income families across the country get access to at least one nutritious meal every day, fall under the FNS’ purview.
“I honestly have no idea how providing food to children in schools is somehow connected to transgender policies. What we see here is the Biden administration using children as pawns in this social justice, gender ideology game that they are playing,” Prior said, according to Fox News, slamming the USDA policy as a “vast overreach of federal power.”
The USDA justified its actions, according to Fox News, by pointing to an Executive Order President Joe Biden signed that, according to the Biden administration, helps “support the mental health of transgender children, remove barriers that transgender people face accessing critical government services, and improve the visibility of transgender people in our nation’s data.”
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” the order stipulates.
However, allowing students to access the bathrooms of the opposite gender simply because they claim they are of that gender even if they don’t biologically belong to that gender threatens the privacy rights of the students of that gender biologically.
“We will not allow Biden to force Floridians to choose between children’s food and parents’ rights,” Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw told the Washington Free Beacon. “That is the kind of ‘decision’ that a totalitarian regime would force upon its citizenry.”
Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem vowed legal action from her state against the USDA order.
“Joe Biden has threatened to take away children’s school lunch money to pursue his radical agenda,” Noem told the Free Beacon. “He’s targeting states like ours that make it clear biological men do NOT belong in girls’ bathrooms and sports. If you act on this, Joe, we’ll see you in court and we will win.”
