If abiding by this state law is unacceptable to the plaintiffs, they are free to forgo taxpayer funding.” “The Maine Human Rights Act is in place to protect Mainers from discrimination and the Office of the Attorney General is steadfast in upholding the law. “All Mainers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, whether it be in their workplace, their housing, or in their classrooms,” Attorney General Aaron Frey said. The Maine Attorney General’s Office, which represented Maine officials before the Supreme Court in the recent lawsuit, said in a statement Tuesday that the Maine Human Rights Act is in place to prevent discrimination. “A religious school has to be able to teach from its religious perspective, that’s what makes it a religious school,” said Lea Patterson, an attorney for the First Liberty Institute, the conservative, Christian legal nonprofit based in Plano, Texas, that is representing Crosspoint in this case. Related Supreme Court ruling on religious schools has broader impact in Maine The church’s complaint includes a tweet from former House Speaker Ryan Fecteau stating that lawmakers “anticipated the ludicrous decision from the far-right SCOTUS” in response to another tweet that Maine “changed the guidelines to exclude schools that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students.” However, attorneys for Crosspoint Church said statements by public officials after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling indicated that the religious exemption was added precisely because of that expected ruling. Those protections were upheld in a 2014 ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that found a school had violated a transgender girl’s rights by denying her access to the women’s restroom. Instead, most people who submitted testimony focused on changes that clarified rules on discrimination based on gender identity that have existed in Maine since 2005.Įquality Maine Executive Director Gia Drew said Tuesday that gender identity was previously included under the definition of sexual orientation. Public testimony before the Legislature at the time didn’t mention the lawsuit against the state. Changes to the Human Rights Act were introduced in May 2021, three months after the appeal was sent to the U.S.
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