A quick online search explains my visceral reaction to the use of the word “regime” for the current Obama administration. A regime is “a government, especially an authoritarian one.” It is also defined as a “system or planned way of doing things, especially one imposed from above.”

I don’t react so strongly any more. That’s how this administration is acting.

Now, after a slew of top-down edicts from this regime, we read this recent letter from the top civil rights officials in the departments of justice and education. Addressed to “Dear Colleague,” it purports to offer “significant guidance” on whether schools are following what the administration insists are “their legal obligations” to protect students against “discrimination based on a student’s gender identity.”

It is a condescending, authoritarian and dangerous effort to change the law without Congress or the vote of the people. It invents legal obligations based on the administration’s giving new meaning to regulations, meanings these regulations have never had before.The Obama Regime threatens to use the power of the purse to enforce its radical agenda.

Obama’s Cultural Revolution

On May 16, 2016, the pogrom euphemistically called the Cultural Revolution in communist China commemorated its fiftieth anniversary. An estimated 36 million people were beaten, tortured, lost their homes, or sent to labor camps, and 750,000 killed — just in the countryside. The current regime in Mainland China is seeking to erase from the collective memory what really happened during those days of tyranny.

The Obama administration is engaging in a bloodless cultural revolution, by trying to compel every public school facility to implement a new form of cultural revolution which rejects the gift of sexual difference and substitutes a radical idea called “gender identity.”

In a recent piece on The Stream, I opined, “The Justice Department is substituting gender identity for sex in the regulatory framework of the Civil Rights Act. The implications of this abuse of power are staggering.” And they are. I warned that if the same treatment given to protected classes like race, color, and sex are now based on a self-determined, fluid notion of “identity” and not objective, factual, scientific, biological data, the efficacy of all anti-discrimination laws is undermined. Any connection between law and objective truth will have fallen victim to Orwellian newspeak masquerading as civil rights.

That is precisely what President Obama intends to do, through one more abuse of executive power. In this allegedly helpful advisory letter written to his “Colleagues,” the Obama regime implies that any state which does not comply will have federal funds withheld.

Putting aside the important fact that all “federal funds” are actually the funds of the American people, this is unconstitutional and illegal. That is why states are lining up to bring federal lawsuits and any politician who has not consumed the Kool-Aid is speaking out against this insane misuse of federal power.

It all brings into focus the importance of parental or school choice. Those who support school choice call for a public policy and enabling legislation that lets all parents, no matter what their socio-economic situation, to choose where to send their children to school.

This choice should be available for parents from among a full array of options including public, private, parochial, virtual, charter and home schools. Thus, the policy is better understood as “parental choice” in education. It recognizes that parents are their children’s first teachers and should be the ones who make the choice where to expand their teaching mission for their own children. The United Nation’s Declaration on Human Rights says this explicitly: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

As a constitutional lawyer I know this can be accomplished in a constitutionally sound way by empowering parents to make this vital choice through properly drafted voucher legislation, tax credits and opportunity scholarships.

Good Governance

School choice is not a threat to good governance. It applies the social ordering principle of subsidiarity. That principle says that governance should begin at the smallest level first and that the higher levels should help the lower levels and not take their responsibilities or usurp their rights.

School choice will return the leadership of our national educational endeavor to parents and the local community. It will also improve the public school system by ensuring that parents can choose the schools they want for their children. Competition in the delivery of goods and services can have amazing results.

Unfortunately, many who rightly criticize the movement to federalize everything often play into the hands of their opponents by not using precise language. We are not anti-government. We simply affirm what the American founders, common sense and the Natural Law affirm: That governing is generally best when it is closest to home.

This is vital in this precarious time in the history of the United States, when the Obama regime is seeking to misuse federal authority to implement a new cultural revolution.