MAGA dad silenced by Maine school board chair after speaking out against boys in girls' sports



A Maine man was silenced during a school board meeting this week after he spoke out against boys playing on sports teams meant for girls.

On Wednesday evening, Nick Blanchard and others concerned about boys in girls' sports attended a board of education meeting in the capital city of Augusta. Decked out in a "Make America Great Again" hat and a T-shirt warning Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, "You're fired," Blanchard went to the podium during the public comment portion to address several steps that had been taken on the issue in the district lately.

Back in March, six of the seven education board members voted to restore the 2020 understanding of Title IX, which excluded males from female teams. One board member voted against the move.

"Good job and thank you to the six members that voted to go back to the 2020 interpretation of Title IX, and shame on the one board member that voted no," Blanchard stated.

At that point, Chair Martha Witham interrupted Blanchard and averred: "I’m sorry, but negative comments will not be allowed."

Blanchard then shifted gears and began discussing a Change.org petition he had launched to remove Kim Liscomb as the principal of Cony Middle and High School. Liscomb also happens to be the current president of the Maine Principals’ Association, a group that supports trans-identifying male athletes joining girls' teams as part of the Maine Human Rights Act.

"Most of you have heard by now that I started a petition that Augusta concerned parents, both Republican and Democrat, are signing," Blanchard explained. "I’m asking if you, the school board members, will put up a vote to have Ms. Kim—"

Before Blanchard finished his sentence, Witham interrupted him again, insisting that his comments were "defamatory." When Blanchard asked Witham to clarify in what way they were "defamatory," Witham apparently dodged the question.

"I don’t have to explain it to you," she shot back, adding, "These comments will not be tolerated at the meeting directed toward us or to anybody else in this room."

'Communist China right here!'

Blanchard then tried another approach, referring to Liscomb abstractly as "someone who is the president of the Maine Principal’s Association," but that attempt did nothing to placate Witham.

"Nope, close enough. I’m sorry, you’re done, Mr. Blanchard," Witham said before ordering him to leave the podium.

Blanchard eventually complied but lodged one final retort on his way out: "Communist China right here!" Some of his allies, all dressed in red, then left the meeting, WMTW-TV reported, though whether Blanchard left with them is unclear.

The outlet further claimed that Blanchard's petition to oust Liscomb had been "gaining traction" recently, collecting nearly 1,000 signatures. However, as of Friday morning, Blanchard's Change.org petition appears to have gathered barely 150 signatures, though a similar petition to remove Liscomb started by another angry Augusta parent has crested 1,000 signatures.

In his petition, Blanchard aligns himself with "other parents and students" in Augusta who take issue with the MPA allowing "biological boys to participate in women's sports without due consideration of the concerns raised by parents and students alike.

"This decision undermines the spirit of fair competition that our school and community strive to uphold, and strikes a blow against gender equality."

Superintendent of Schools Michael Tracy Jr. seemed to shrug off the incident at the school board meeting as "national partisan politics manifesting in local government/school affairs."

"We value community voices and concerns, but there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding regarding appropriate channels for policy change," Tracy wrote in an email, according to WMTW.

Official Augusta School Board policies require members to respect "parents as partners in decisions affecting children and families" and encourage "parent involvement through PTO groups and Board and school advisory committees."

In a statement, the Maine Principals’ Association stood by Liscomb, claiming she had "faithfully executed her duties" and would be missed after her one-year rotation as president ends this summer.

"Recently, there has been local attention focused on her, which could be related to the Maine Principals' Association's policy on sports participation," the MPA statement continued. "If Congress or the State Legislature changes the law, we will adapt our policy accordingly."

Maine has until Friday to amend its policies to accord with the federal ban on male participation in female sports. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on February 5 to keep men out of women's sports and "to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities."

The state filed a lawsuit earlier this week, accusing the Trump administration of "illegally withholding grant funds that go to keeping children fed."

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Horowitz: All 3 Trump-appointed justices have helped destroy female sports



Remember those promises to win back the Supreme Court and overturn bad decisions that have stood for decades, like Roe v. Wade? Well, it turns out that, after having gotten three Supreme Court picks, the phony conservative legal establishment that advised Trump failed to even get judges who wouldn't add new odious precedents. Now we are all paying the price for it – so much so that red states can't even keep boys out of girls' sports.

Last Wednesday, Southern District of West Virginia Judge Joseph R. Goodwin ruled that the state's recently passed law barring men in female sports is unconstitutional. At a time when judges, including those appointed by Trump, are refusing to acknowledge a long-standing recognized right to bodily autonomy, Goodwin wrote that there is a right under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to access the other gender's sports. He also ruled, based on Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, that the law violates Title IX, a federal education law that prevents sex-based discrimination, which was created in 1972, long before anyone thought about gender dysphoria.

I don't think conservatives realized last year just how devastating the Bostock decision was or the extent of its long-term consequences. The radical opinion basically applied the word "sex" in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to transgenderism. At the time, Gorsuch promised that this was just a limited ruling to one statute and would not create a constitutional right for transgenderism, but as Alito warned in his dissent, once you misconstrue the word "sex" as understood in 1964, it would easily be applied as discrimination to other laws, such as Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Well, as I noted last month, Gorsuch had his chance to limit the impact of his decision by overturning the Fourth Circuit in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, which applied sex discrimination in the context of separate public bathrooms in a Virginia school. Yet not only did Gorsuch decline to take up the appeal from the school, the other two Trump appointees – Barrett and Kavanaugh – also allowed this radical opinion to stand. Only Justices Thomas and Alito would have granted certiorari. This means that if we are to subscribe to judicial supremacism, all the laws protecting female sports or barring chemical castration of minors are dead in the water. Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, and Montana have enacted similar laws that are now all on the judicial chopping block.

Yes, Judge Goodwin in West Virginia is a Democrat appointee, but it's clear that the other lower court judges will feel that this is now Supreme Court precedent. Goodwin used the Grimm decision that was implicitly blessed by seven of the nine justices as the basis of his preliminary injunction against the West Virginia law.

It's quite evident that Gorsuch's Bostock opinion, supplemented by the high court's tacit blessing of Grimm, has become the Roe v. Wade of human sexuality. Any law regulating the use of chemical castration for minors will now face the same fate at the courts. Earlier this month in Tennessee, a federal judge placed a temporary injunction on a state law requiring businesses that choose to allow men in female bathrooms (or vice versa) to post signs notifying patrons.

Yes, GOP judges have now codified transgenderism as a civil right against all state recognition of human sexes the way God meant them to be. The ramifications are unlimited and will have bearings on adoptions, Catholic hospitals, and any female private spaces in schools and colleges.

Ironically, this ruling came a week after an Indiana federal judge opined that states have robust "police powers" to force someone to get an experimental vaccine with known side effects and little benefit for those attending public universities. Judge Leichty ruled that there is no Fourteenth Amendment right to bodily autonomy. So, people can be excluded from a public university altogether unless they take an affirmative action against their bodies, yet a state cannot exclude a boy from the girls' sports team in that same college. Just 10 years ago, none of us could have written a satire about the judicial system to capture the degree of intellectual twisting we are experiencing today.

Unless Republicans begin fighting back against the premise of judicial supremacism, there is no hope of ever distinguishing a red state from a blue state in policies. It's time for states to say "no." If a judge can't even provide a shield to protect people from proactive COVID fascism policies taken against one's body, then they most certainly can't serve as a sword to force states to offer affirmative accommodations they don't believe in. The days of waiting to appoint "better judges" are over.