Sexual perversity in Washington

...This is the everyday summary of the new enforcement guidance...

...One of the special features of this area of the law is that it allows the victims to define what is permissible behavior and what is not, to their own satisfaction, after the fact...

...circuit court judges, either by personal letter or via guidance documents duly published in the Federal Register over their signature...

...Obey me, she explained...

...Only Congress is left...

...Now it is literally true that the guidance asserts these things in its introduction...

...They haven't learned that the way to get a date is to ignore girls they're interested in, or at least apply to the Department of Education for permission to look...

...Most controversially, this meant creating and funding athletic programs for girls that were the equal of what boys enjoyed...

...But it also meant abolishing scholarships limited to one sex or the other...

...For one thing, on a purely practical level, the new guidelines make it likelier that public schools which don't manage to control the boorish and vulgar impulses of children to the satisfaction of litigious parents will find themselves contending with a new and expansive tort liability...

...Indeed, the new sexual harassment guidelines promulgated over Cantu's signature are a subject ripe for hearings, since their effect will be to extend the reach of the law far beyond what Congress envisioned when it forbade sex discrimination in federally supported education programs 25 years ago...

...Someone will certainly accuse him of being on the side of the rapists...

...We were just looking over your enforcement budget for the next fiscal year and wondered what exactly you would be enforcing...

...By the same token, no one really believes that American public schools—which are bastions not of unreconstructed male chauvinists but mainly of professional women—are cavalierly allowing girls to be preyed on because responsible federal oversight has been lacking till now...

...It would be healthier, though, if the Republican congressional leadership summoned up the fortitude actually to hold public oversight hearings on Norma Cantu's reign...

...When she released the final draft of the Office of Civil Rights Sexual Harassment Guidance on March 13, it was with the announcement, swallowed whole by a gullible media, that the guidelines declared Jonathan Prevette innocent of harassment...

...Cantu is the law...

...Because it was politically convenient, Nor-ma Cantu's office decided to impugn the judgment and common sense of local school officials...

...As interpreted by the federal courts...

...There are a few federal judges who will do so, but judges eventually get tired of upholding the law unless they receive some aid and comfort from the lawmakers themselves...

...This is what formal "grievance procedures" are in truth designed to do when they are widely publicized to potential victims—which is what the new federal guidelines on sexual harassment call for...

...And, if he hadn't, I knew exactly who to report it to...

...If a 6-year-old Georgie Porgie kisses the girls and makes them cry ("unwelcome behavior"), he is the equivalent under the law of a longshoreman who pins up Playboy centerfolds that make a female co-worker uncomfortable...

...Eventually, it got so bad that I just had to tell him that I didn't want to go out with him, period . . . and, once I told him, he stopped...

...As the New York Times reported, "not only can race be used as a factor in admissions, universities 'have a clear legal obligation to do so,'...Ms...

...And the school district is as liable for not taking seriously the actions of our harassing Georgie Porgie as the longshoreman's boss would be for not controlling what is pinned to his bulletin board...

...Figuratively speaking, Norma Cantu now seeks to embrace Jonathan as well, thereby disguising her social revolution as a reasonable and common-sensical application of the law...

...The "peer sexual harassment" guidelines are not really about sexual harassment as laymen understand the term...

...So far there has been nary a peep about any of this from Congress, which would hardly be overstepping its authority (though it might get called nasty names in a Frank Rich column) should it ask Cantu some simple questions...

...A guy in my chem class kept following me around, staring at me, and asking me out...

...What's more, the story went on, the department "called upon 'the judgment and common sense' of school officials when fighting harassment...

...It's terribly unfair, even scary, that she's forced to just come right out and say, "I don't want to go out with you...

...A Congress that has made reining in torts a front-burner issue might want to find out from school administrators and their lawyers across the country how much they expect to be shelling out to insure themselves and otherwise defend against this expensive new risk...

...There are many memorable features of this brochure, not least of them footnote 3, which refers readers in pseudo-scholarly fashion ("Winship, Beth, Ask Beth, San Francisco Chronicle") to a newspaper column offering advice to children...

...Cantu's letter said...

...His mother understandably raised a fuss, and a spokeswoman for the school district explained that "a 6-year-old kissing another 6-year-old is inappropriate behavior...

...To give them their due, you might say that the first generation of enforcers had a theory of success and a vision of how to achieve it (get the artificial barriers out of the way...

...If students are preyed on in the American educational system, it's because of generalized disorder and eroded authority, not some deep-rooted sexist plot to favor boys that only federal power will suffice to exterminate...

...More fundamentally, it is still supposedly the case that Congress is the federal legislative body, not the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education...

...But of course, he is no such thing...

...She is the forgotten second royal in Clint Bolick's famous "Clinton's Quota Queens" op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, the piece that helped torpedo Lani Guinier's nomination to be Cantu's counterpart at the Justice Department...

...And now, thanks to the new guidelines from the Office of Civil Rights, the law is clearer than it has ever been...

...For it appears that the Office of Civil Rights is using that legislation—known as Title IX—to take the country towards a public-education regime in which schools will have to maintain a bureaucratic apparatus that can catalogue, investigate, punish, and prevent so-called sexual harassment of students by their peers to the satisfaction of federal overseers...

...Today's enforcers, on the other hand, have nightmares of oppression and failure and a theory of how to stave it off (bring federal muscle to bear on behalf of the weak and vulnerable...

...Guys (especially guys in chem class) who follow girls around and stare at them and ask them out more than once are potentially dangerous...

...But the other 22,000 or so words in the document put the lie to this sunny assessment...

...And who will contradict the Office for Civil Rights...

...But those are precisely the qualities that no prudent local official reading the new guidelines has any grounds to imagine he will find in Washington...

...That's what sexual harassment once meant, but innovative lawyers and judges have refined the concept to include the actions of supposed equals, fellow workers or fellow managers, and even to take account of the "environ-ment"—the atmosphere or tone of personal relations that management either imposes or allows to prevail...

...There shall be an official "grievance procedure" and at least one employee designated to coordinate the school's "efforts to comply with and carry out its Title IX responsibilities...

...It so happens that a real-world Georgie Porgie, 6-year-old Jonathan Prevette of Lexington, N.C., made national headlines last fall when he was punished by his school for kissing a classmate...

...The better practice is . . . to follow the Guidance" of Can-tu's office, the guidance itself states...

...And they haven't learned to read minds...

...Or at least her office is...

...To them, rape was a capital crime...

...There ought to be a law...

...Don't take my word for it: Call up the Department of Education and ask for a copy of their new pamphlet, "Sexual Harassment: It's Not Academic...

...But let's be charitable and consider only the following quotation, which appears in the pamphlet in bold type as an example in a section on what a student can do when "confronted with sexual harassment...

...And in case there is any lingering confusion, Cantu elaborates: "The existence of Fifth Circuit decisions that are inconsistent with [Department of Education] policy does not prohibit schools in these States from following the Guidance...

...The laws Congress has passed...

...Most strikingly, it appears that Norma Cantu is above the law...

...The AP story set the tone for the coverage that followed: Under the headline "Education Department clears young kisser," the wire service explained that "Jonathan Prevette, the first-grader who was punished last year for kissing a girl at school, can put his mind at ease" because the Clinton administration has declared that "a peck on the cheek by a 6-year-old falls short of sexual harassment...

...Sexual Perversity in Washington The Brave New World of Norma Cantu By Richard Starr Norma V. Cantu, head of the Clinton Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, is a left-wing litigator, a veteran of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, who has never met a racial quota she didn't like...

...Not according to Cantu...

...admitting men and women to professional schools without preference for one sex or the other...

...Did that same court last year rule that school districts can't be sued if one student sexually harasses another...

...All sarcasm aside, it's plain that what Norma Can-tu's guidelines are designed for is to be an engine of social change...

...And if that doesn't work you can sue...

...Unwelcome is unwelcome at any age...

...Which means a couple of things...

...They are not about a form of extortion or blackmail, occurring between boss and worker or teacher and student, where there is something of value—favors or raises or grades—to be exchanged or withheld as the case may be...

...Or at least she says they are...

...The footnotes delicately allow that the relevant "law is evolving," but then comes some not-so-veiled advice to any school bold enough to follow the lead of the federal court...

...What the North Carolina official said last fall— "unwelcome is unwelcome at any age"—is as apt a six-word summary of Norma Cantu's federal guidance on the subject as any...

...Sexual harassment guidelines are an especially powerful engine of social change because it takes courage for a politician to stand up and call them legally mischievous, if not fanatical...

...It's well and good for the Department of Education to invoke judgment and common sense...

...When Congress first drafted Title IX and made it law in 1972, its purpose was to expand opportunities for girls and women...

...Let's deconstruct their Utopia...

...Did the U.S...

...And the existence of such an apparatus, tasked with receiving the reports and then appeasing the grievances of the harassed, will in fact multiply the myriad frustrations and unhappinesses of ordinary lives into more grievances rather than fewer...

...It's really bad of them the way they don't take a hint when a girl lies to them and says she's not feeling well...

...even getting rid of curfews on campuses, so that girls could sleep around on an equal basis with boys...

...The Office of Civil Rights is known to favor informal proceedings and a quiet resolution of differences when it audits school districts for compliance with federal anti-discrimination law, so the House leadership could take a similar approach and delegate a staffer to call Cantu's office for a chat: "What's up with the assistant secretary on sexual harassment and Hopwood...

...But unless someone contradicts the Norma Cantus on this point, they will prevail...

...This is the vision that undergirds Norma Cantu's new sexual-harassment guidelines...

...Or did you have something else in mind...

...The Title IX enforcers of the past dreamed that by destroying the barriers thrown up by custom and traditional sex roles, they would midwife the birth of a hardy new unisex species—boys who learned to cook and sew in home-ec class, girls who could add superchargers to their hot-rods in the high school auto shop, all of them playing rugby together after school, or even wrestling one another in organized competition...

...They claim to be sexual egalitarians, but their nightmares are peopled almost exclusively with girls (and the occasional homosexual boy) who are victimized by a jock-ocracy of cocky males...

...university that complies with the Hopwood decision by making its admissions policies colorblind...

...Most people who pay attention to such things think so, but not Cantu...

...Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit strike down racial quotas for university admissions in its historic Hopwood v. Texas decision last year...

...One, some fairly senior civil servant at the Office of Civil Rights made up the quote...

...If that clod in the chem class fails to cease and desist with his "unwelcome" attention even after you report him to the designated officials, or if the officials fail to apply the official "disciplinary procedure," or even if they fail to resolve the complaint in a "prompt and equitable" fashion, you can have the school district investigated by OCR...

...Congress will have decided: Ms...

...Her office has just published in the Federal Register its new guidelines for stamping out "peer sexual harassment...

...Certainly not Cantu's superiors in the Clinton administration, who have never publicly expressed anything but the deepest satisfaction with an office that keeps the Left happy at no cost whatsoever to the administration's reputation for amiable, bumbling, corrupt, Keystone Kops centrism...

...This is how the Education Department now interprets the law...

...One student's horseplay can be another student's "hostile environment," which can "adversely affect a student's education," which may be a form of discrimination by sex, the elimination of which was the purpose of Title IX...

...If Congress doesn't check Norma Cantu's runaway leftism, it won't really be fair to complain that she holds herself above the law...

...In the absence of federal oversight, these young perps run amok, winked at by school administrators who are always chuckling to themselves the rarely heard phrase "boys will be boys...

...they could ask one of her aides...

...It will turn out that, in fact, assistant secretaries of education can overrule the considered opinions of U.S...

...True patriarchs never said "boys will be boys...

...At first, I told him I was busy, or not feeling well...

...ending single-sex classes, including gym and sex-ed...

...If you declare that an environment is "hostile" to you, you have a case...

...But if those local school officials have lawyers with common sense, they will be crazy not to crack the whip when 6-year-old boys kiss their classmates, especially if the classmates complain...

...Cantu is also a sexual-harassment radical who wants federal regulation of boy-girl contact from pre-school through grad school...

...and two, since the dialogue is invented, this must be how the Title IX enforcers hope people will be talking under the new sexual-harassment dispensation...

...ellipsis in the original] This passage, too, is footnoted, and careful researchers will learn by checking the reference that "this quote is a composite drawn from different OCR cases...

...This is an expansive legal concept indeed, and the legal substance of the new Education Department guidelines is their assertion that the prevailing law of the workplace is also the law of the classroom, the school bus, and the playground...

...In a March 18 letter to Texas legislators, she threatened to cut off federal funding to any Richard Starr is managing editor of The Weekly Standard...

...And there is...

...Jesse Helms, running for reelection and with a nose as good as anyone's for sniffing out a political opportunity, embraced young Jonathan on the campaign trail...