The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Aside from that deep immorality, the move also is illegal. South Dakota v Dole made clear that the Federal government cannot use threats of withholding funding in order to coerce compliance with Federal diktats regarding intra-State, or local, behaviors. Dole was a case in which the Federal government withheld a percentage of Federal highway funding from South Dakota over its refusal to comply with a then-recently enacted alcohol drinking age limit, and South Dakota objected to the withholding. The ruling held that the Feds could, indeed, withhold a percentage of Federal funding, but it could not do withhold a high enough fraction to be coercive. Withholding all of the school lunch funding is plainly coercive, and it’s intended to be so.