Week in Review: Goldwater Goes to the Supreme Court Again!

March 5, 2022

Does an announcement from the U.S. Supreme Court mean one of the greatest injustices ever inflicted on Native Americans could soon be banished to the ash heap of history? The Court, which only takes a fraction of a percentage of all cases it’s asked to review, said Monday it would consider the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1978 law that effectively prohibits the adoption of Native American children by adults of different races.

The statute imposes race-based restrictions on foster care and adoption of at-risk Indian children, and essentially requires these children to be more abused and for longer before state child welfare officers can intervene. Ultimately, it ensures they cannot be protected in the same way as if they “were white, black, Asian, or Hispanic,” Goldwater Institute Vice President for Litigation Timothy Sandefur said in recent federal testimony.

As Sandefur notes, Goldwater has done more work on the ICWA issue than any other group nationwide, and the Supreme Court’s announcement is a welcome development, especially given that the Court has only ever decided two cases involving the Act.

Read more about the Supreme Court announcement at In Defense of Liberty.

Parents Get One Step Closer to Prying Open the Black Box of K-12 Curricula

With a decisive vote in favor of Goldwater’s academic transparency reform, the Wyoming state Senate became the latest legislative body to realize the cry from parents for transparency is too loud to ignore.

As Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes, the Civics Transparency Act ensures that all materials used in government-operated K-12 schools are disclosed to parents and the public. Wyoming now joins Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa, Arizona, and Kansas in advancing this reform through at least one legislative committee or chamber.

Even as teachers union forces sought to block transparency, one mom’s testimony to the Wyoming Senate Education Committee sums up why academic transparency is so important: “I went to the next teacher and asked, ‘What is my first-grader going to be learning this year?’, and she said, ‘Go talk to the principal.’ … I went to talk to the principal … and he couldn’t give me any information at all of what my daughter was going to be learning that year … and then he turned around and blamed us,” the mom said. “All we’re asking for is more transparency and to work with the parents more. We’re getting shut out.”

Read more at In Defense of Liberty and learn more about Goldwater is working to keep radical politics out of the classroom here.

The Return of Gov’t-Mandated Gender Discrimination?

March is Women’s History Month, and we should remember how American women purged our laws of gender discrimination, lest we be doomed to repeat history, Goldwater Executive Vice President Christina Sandefur writes.

Legal restrictions on women in the workforce—including laws that excluded women from certain professions and barred married women from working—were common until the mid-twentieth century. Today, we understand that such mandates were attempts to relegate women to the roles male-dominated governments thought they should fill. “But the same century-old justification for those discriminatory rules is being recycled by today’s proponents of gender-based mandates: Big Brother needs to ‘help’ women because we can’t help ourselves,” Sandefur says.

In the face of laws that dictate how many women should serve on a company’s board, or the question of whether a woman should value flexibility over higher pay, it’s important to “honor the work of the brave women who toiled to secure true gender equality by treating women as individuals with unique preferences and needs,” she adds. “Rather than shackling the next generation of women with messages of despair, let’s empower them to pursue their dreams and teach them that the best way to fight prejudice is through excellence.”

Read the rest at In Defense of Liberty.