Note: We don’t often get an opportunity to make comments regarding events right in South Dakota, though that State is our home base for The Price of Liberty, but today is an exception!

Federal purse strings have been used for a long time. Why? Because they are effective: the States have become vitally addicted to federal money. Money stolen from American taxpayers – including their own – and from future Americans. Again, including their own people and businesses. And as a result, the States are committing suicide with the active help of DC. Both DC’s and local politicians’ hands are on the strings, pulling, pulling, pulling.

The latest example is found in an article on the Washington Times. As part of the FedGov effort (and of its current “official” controllers) effort to transform the States into a woke utopia, the Feds are pushing “gender equality” and other nonsense regarding transgender, transexual, cross-dressing, and other perversions. One way they are doing this is that old tried and true tactic: federal purse strings.

Literally, the FedGov is now playing the role of the grade-school bully who steals the younger child’s lunch money!

(Note, that as lovers of liberty, if someone wants to declare themselves to be a sex different from their biological sex (XX or XY), that is their own business. We have the freedom to be stupid. To be woke. To be a contrary (Northern Plains AmerInd term) or whatever. And to accept responsibility (and consequences) for it. The problem is when people push this attitude and belief on others – when they start ramming it down other people’s throats. ESPECIALLY when it is government goons (and guns) that they call on. Read on.)

The current regime in DC has decided that collegiate (and other, presumably) sports MUST accept, acknowledge, embrace, and champion subjective determinations about whether you are male or female. Objective standards are out the window. No matter what your plumbing, no matter what your DNA, what your genes, what your chromosomes are. If you suddenly sit up one day and I am a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, no matter that you are six-feet-tall, bald as a billiard ball, and your mother lives next door and the hospital you were born in is across the street (just like on your birth certificate!), we are ALL supposed to accept that you are tiny, hirsute, and hail from 4.3 light years away.

Including sports teams in grade school, middle and high school, and “higher” education. A boy or man declares himself to be inwardly female, and the FedGov wants to mandate that the school ACCEPT the mental-physical disconnect and accomodate it. Including being included in girls’ and women’s sports teams and competition. Rejecting the natural (or G-d-given) differences between those with XY and those with XX genes. The FedGov of course recognizes that this makes a mockery of supposed “essential” anti-discrimination laws like Title IX. But they do not care.

Of course, people – and even government goons in some States and counties and municipalities and school districts get upset about this denial of nature and G-d. (Others, of course, who are woke, want to ram it down their throats, claiming (falsely) that it is the same as racial and sexual and religious equality.)

South Dakota, governor Kristi Noem, is one of those States that have taken action to prevent abuse of women by men claiming to be women, and denying the validity of transgender expression in same-sex sports events. And of course, DC – especially a DC nominally ruled by Uncle Joe and really run by pure, distilled hatred of liberty AND these nations once founded on liberty.

So enter the purse strings. Uncle Joe’s minions want to deny federal “lunch” money – money “given” by the FedGov to pay part of the costs of schools providing breakfasts and lunches (and snacks) to children. Especially to students from low-income (or otherwise privileged) families and homes. Unless the States stop “discriminating” against transgender women (men who believe – or claim to believe – that they are really women: boys that are inward girls, etc.).

This tactic has worked time and time again: gun laws, drivers license age laws, DUI laws, speed limit laws, and on and on and on. Until it is the FedGov calling the shots on virtually everything that once-free and once-sovereign States once did.

Noem is one of the poster children for this new attack on state sovereignty, this new bully-boy tactic. There are many others, but she is fairly well-known. Especially since, as the Washington Times story relates, threatens to sue the FedGov if the Education Department and Department of Human Services attempts to carry out this nastiness. Well, we shall see. South Dakota and Noem, at this moment, seem unlikely to cave.

The States, of course, did this to themselves – South Dakota included. They accept – and BEG – for FedGov money. And they normally DO cave in to the FedGov demands attached. Fighting this does not forgive that. But still, it is better to fight!

Now, a brief afterword: Noem is NOT a libertarian or close to it. She might be the lesser of two (or three) bad choices. (She’s running for re-election in SD this year.) But she is a statist. As are all the others who are governors and such fighting DC over this and other issues. But they are, at least, co-belligerents who can help our fight.