Washington, D.C. — Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares ripped the Biden administration and Department of Agriculture for requiring schools receiving national school lunch funding to allow transgender biological males in women’s activities and facilities.
On Tuesday, Miyares and the attorneys general of 22 Republican-led states filed a lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture over a memorandum that said the department would withhold funding for the National School Lunch Program from districts that did not allow students to engage in activities based on their desired gender identity instead of their biological sex.
TWENTY-TWO STATES SUE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION OVER TRANSGENDER RULE FOR SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM
“They’re essentially saying, ‘We are requiring you to have biological males in women’s sports, we are requiring you to allow biological males to use women’s bathrooms, female bathrooms, and if you don’t, we’re going to withhold nutrition assistance for needy children,'” Miyares said in an interview with the Washington Examiner at the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference.
He added: “To use children to try to push … this far-left political ideology is Exhibit A of federal overreach.”
The lawsuit seeks to invalidate the memorandum, arguing that the Biden administration and the department failed to follow the Administrative Procedure Act, which delineates how executive branch agencies must issue new regulations.
“We’ve had over 122 million lunches that have been given to Virginia schoolchildren, and the idea that the Biden administration would use nutrition assistance for needy kids to score a political point, we couldn’t abide by that,” Miyares said. “We’re gonna stand with parents, we’re gonna stand with local school districts.”
Miyares took office in January following a Republican sweep of the Virginia governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general races, the first statewide Republican victories since 2009. The ticket, led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, campaigned on a platform of parental rights. Hours after taking office, Youngkin issued a flurry of executive orders, including one that allowed parents to opt their children out of school mask mandates.
“I had to go out and defend them and enforce them,” Miyares said of the executive orders, adding that his office received messages from people who accused them of attempting to infect children with coronavirus.
A group of school districts sued the governor over the order, seeking to maintain mask mandates in their schools, but were unsuccessful.
Miyares recounted how after a judge in Loudoun County ruled the order was legal under Virginia law, he received a phone call from a Virginia mother who told him that her 9-year-old daughter was “so excited because, for the very first time, she’ll be able to see what her best friend at school actually looks like.”
“That conversation just crystallized for me so much of what we’re seeing with the mental health crisis with our kids,” the attorney general said. “Us taking on the mask mandate is an illustration of saying we’re going to empower parents.”