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FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A new lawsuit alleges that Vermont blocked two families from fostering children, despite the state’s foster care system crisis, because the families held traditional, religious views on gender and sexuality.
Brian and Kaitlyn Wuoti and Michael and Rebecca Gantt accused the Vermont Department for Children and Families of mandating an “ideological position at the expense of children” in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. Both Brian Wuoti and Michael Gantt are pastors, and both families hold traditional, Christian religious views.
The Daily Signal is first reporting the existence of the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, Windham Division. The Daily Signal also exclusively sat down with both the Gantt family and the Wuoti family for interviews in Vermont, where they described how they were prevented from adopting or fostering needy children due to their religious beliefs.
“Although the Wuotis and Gantts have adopted five children between them, the Department has determined they are unfit to foster or adopt any child solely due to their religiously inspired and widely held belief that girls cannot become boys or vice versa,” the filing states.
“And Vermont applies this policy categorically—whether applicants want to adopt their grandchild, provide respite care for an infant for just a few hours, or foster a child who shares all of their religious views,” the complaint continues. “Vermont would prefer children have no home than to place them with families of faith with these views.”
Vermont foster officials have described a “desperate need for emergency foster homes” as recently as Dec. 19. In an email obtained by The Daily Signal, Foster/Kin Care Manager Carrie Deem told foster families that she was “reaching out for help,” describing an “urgent” need.
“The raw honesty behind this message is that of desperation,” she wrote in the email, sent shortly before Christmas. “We need you! Family Services is in a crisis beyond what we have seen before.”
Vermont’s own Department for Children and Families website notes that “we always need more foster families in Vermont.” The crisis has become so extreme, particularly due to the opioid endemic, that some children in need of homes have been forced to stay in hospital emergency rooms or police departments.
Typically, there are about 1,060 children in state custody, the Vermont Department for Children and Families told a local outlet in May 2023, and approximately 900 licensed foster families.
The Wuoti parents, inspired by their Christian faith, decided to answer the state’s call to help vulnerable children and first became foster parents in 2014. The lawsuit describes how they “adopted two precious brothers who have become an integral part of their family.”
The Gantt parents, who have four biological children, began fostering in 2016. They have since adopted three “beautiful children,” as the lawsuit says, noting that they “have a heart for children with fetal alcohol syndrome and those born addicted to drugs.”
When the Wuotis sought to renew their license in 2022, the lawsuit says, one caseworker described them as “AMAZING” and said she “probably could not hand pick a more wonderful foster family,” while their licenser said he had “no doubt” they would gladly welcome any child into their home.
“But when the Wuotis politely shared that they were Christian,” the lawsuit states, “and that they could not say or do anything that went against faith-informed views about human sexuality, Vermont revoked their license anyway.”
Similarly, the Department for Children and Families asked the Gantts to take in an emergency placement that involved a baby about to be born to a homeless woman who was addicted to drugs. Before the Gantts could agree to do so, the department sent out an email letting families know that they must accept the State’s views on gender ideology “even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs,” according to the lawsuit.
“The Gantts responded that they would unconditionally love and support any children placed with them, but they would not forsake their religious beliefs that people should value their God-given bodies,” the lawsuit states. “The Department refused to let the Gantts take the baby in need and instead revoked their license.”
The Gantt and Wuoti lawsuit argues that Vermont Department for Children and Families’ policy not only harms children and “hinders their chance to find forever homes,” it also violates the First Amendment.
“It requires parents to speak the State’s controversial views, while restricting parents’ ability to politely share their commonsense beliefs to any child in any context—categorically excluding disfavored viewpoints from the foster-parent pool entirely,” the filing states. “Vermont’s regulations also target particular religious views for unequal treatment through an exemption-riddled system of individualized assessments.”
The Vermont Department for Children and Families, reached for comment by The Daily Signal, shared some of the segments on gender from its website. Section 200 of the licensing rules states that “all foster parents are prohibited from engaging in any form of discrimination against a foster child based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, or disability.”
Section 201.10 calls for applicants and foster parents to show “respect for the worth of all individuals regardless of race, color, national origin, ancestry, culture, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual identity, and physical or mental ability.”
The licensing rules specifically order foster parents to “support children in wearing” any items affirming their racial, cultural, tribal, religious, or gender identity.
Both the Wuotis and the Gantts told The Daily Signal that they would have loved and cherished any children put in their care by the state. But the Department for Children and Families had asked them if they would be open to taking their foster children to pride parades or using preferred pronouns to refer to the children. The Wuotis and the Gantts both said no.
“We were surprised, because they are typically always trying to match children with families as best they can, and so we assumed maybe they would say, ‘Ok, maybe we won’t place an LGBT child with this family,’” said Brian Wuoti.
“We were offered to be reeducated and given the choice that they could either revoke our foster license or we could take some education materials, and they could give us up to a year to change our faith,” added Michael Gantt. “And I said, ‘No, we are not going to change our faith in the next year; absolutely not.’”
Kaitlyn Wuoti said that she herself had experienced gender dysphoria at a young age, saying that she “desperately wanted to be a boy.” Her father affirmed to her that she was, in fact, a girl, but encouraged her to be interested in tomboy pursuits like model cars.
“My parents loved me, let me like the things I liked, never lied to me about who I was, and never encouraged me to hate my own body,” she explained.
The Wuotis believe that background gives them special insight into helping a child struggling with gender dysphoria.
“They … genuinely think that this is the care of these children that are in need, so I understand, in a way, where they are coming from,” Brian Wuoti added. “But we also know, in the way that Katie had been loved and cared for by her parents, that there can be wonderful, flourishing outcomes for children even in a home that doesn’t agree with the state on these issues.”
Watch The Daily Signal’s interviews with the Wuoti and Gantt families here:
The post EXCLUSIVE: Vermont Blocked Christian Families From Fostering Over Gender Ideology, Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In response to new federal rules on pronouns and bathrooms based on gender identity, 18 state attorneys general are suing the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
“This end-run around our constitutional institutions misuses federal power to eliminate women’s private spaces and punish the use of biologically accurate pronouns, all at the expense of Tennessee employers,” Skrmetti said in a public statement.
The Daily Signal first reported last month that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance determining that an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a personal pronoun that the person doesn’t want used.
The guidance, which the EEOC adopted on a party-line vote of 3-2, would determine how the commission would handle an employee complaint on the matter and also could affect other employee litigation as the formal federal policy.
EEOC has 2,331 employees, according to its 2023 annual report.
Joining Tennessee in the lawsuit are Republican attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
“In America, the Constitution gives the power to make laws to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable commissioners, and this EEOC guidance is an attack on our constitutional separation of powers,” Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, said. “When, as here, a federal agency engages in government over the people instead of government by the people, it undermines the legitimacy of our laws and alienates Americans from our legal system.”
The EEOC issued new sexual harassment guidance that extends Title VII’s prohibition of sex-based discrimination to cover gender identity. Title VII forbids employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer, public or private, with more than 15 employees.
Under this guidance, an employer may be responsible under Title VII if the employer, or another employee, uses a name or personal pronoun other than the one an employee prefers for his or her gender identity, or limits access to a restroom or other sex-segregated facility that isn’t consistent with what the employee prefers to use.
This rule prevails regardless of the biological sex of the employee in question.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” EEOC’s new enforcement guidance says.
An EEOC spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the Justice Department for comment on this report. A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond by publication time.
In a previous public statement, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows, a Democrat, praised the enforcement guidance.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” Burrows said shortly after the commission announced the guidelines. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrats, Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal. The commission’s two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
In 2021, Burrows attempted to unilaterally include such actions under what constitutes harassment through a press release, without public comment or a vote by the full commission.
However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. Another federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did not appeal the rulings.
The post 18 States Fight Federal Trans Agenda on Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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