What’s dangerous about accepting federal money? They might come back someday and require you to say the sky is green, that two plus two equals five, or that a boy can decide to “be” a girl, that’s what.
A private religious school in Florida has had to take on the Biden administration and Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in federal court, saying it’s having to forfeit tens of thousands of dollars from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program because its beliefs don’t permit it to follow new federal sex-discrimination protections for homosexual and transgender people.
A lawyer for Grant Park Christian Academy said the school’s failure to comply with the federal “guidelines” will keep it from providing reduced-price or free meals to students from low-income families, according to The Palm Beach Post. Fried’s office administers the program.
Erica Steinmiller-Perdomo, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the school, said in a statement: “The Biden administration is ignoring the law and forcing this wonderful school to make an untenable choice: violate its religious beliefs or stop providing lunches to children.”
In a statement announcing the July 27 lawsuit, the school’s religious beliefs “preclude it from complying with a federal mandate to substitute gender identity for biological sex in any aspect of its activities.”
Except that to receive federal money, they now must announce to the world that their religious convictions are less important than the dollars.
“It’s wrong for government officials to threaten to take the funding for those meals away simply because we wish to live and operate consistent with our religious convictions,” said Pastor Alfred Johnson, president of Faith Action Ministry Alliance, the school’s parent organization.
Fried’s office said it has yet to be served with the lawsuit, but agency spokesperson Erin Moffet’s response was politically charged, calling it “a politically-motivated attempt to distract from the fact that the DeSantis Administration and his Department of Children and Families are failing to carry out the federal nutrition programs under their authority.”
The Alliance attorney said the school last year received more than $76,000 from the National School Lunch Program.
