Members of the black conservative group Project 21 have condemned the Obama administration’s “edict” that schools allow boys and girls who identify as the opposite sex to freely use the bathroom and locker room of their choice.

The administration issued the order on Friday, just days after it sued North Carolina for its bathroom law. Schools that fail to comply were told they face a loss of federal education dollars.

The black leaders criticized both the order and how the administration has compared gender identity measures to blacks’ fight for civil rights.

“Comparing gender dysphoria to innate characteristics such as race is a bridge too far for scientific-minded individuals, but not for the Organized Left,” said St. Louis talk show host Stacy Washington. “The idea that a mentally ill person should assume the mantle of civil rights so hard-fought and won by black Americans is insulting.”

Washington also called for “women’s rights advocates” to oppose “newfound rights” given to those people who consider themselves the opposite sex. “The edict issued by the Obama Administration is just another reason for parents and legislators to support school choice,” concluded Washington.

Joe Hicks said the administration was simply acting upon Obama’s liberal ideology. “Released from any need to pretend that he’s a ‘moderate,’ Obama ran his leftist social justice flag even higher up the flagpole by threatening every public school district in the nation with punishment if they don’t allow all transgender students to use any bathroom or locker room they want.”

According to Hicks, “we are expected to accept the notion that the privacy concerns of ‘straight’ students is simply not as valuable as the claimed rights of transgender youths.”

“On its own merits, advancing this new and destructive social morality is problematic,” said Derryck Green. “That Barack Obama has done so by attaching this insanity to the legacy of civil rights, specifically that of Jim Crow segregation, trivializes everything the brave men and women experienced and sacrificed in the pursuit of social, economic and legal equality. The physical and emotional abuse blacks endured under segregation, on a good day, are in no way analogous to the adulation and ‘rights’ that those who suffer from gender dysmorphia are experiencing and receiving.”

Nadra Enzi called the promotion of gender identity as a civil right a “farce,” and condemned both Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for being two top players in the effort. “The fact that co-conspirators in this farce include a bi-racial President of the United States who self-identifies as Black, and the second Black U.S. Attorney General, speaks volumes on how far some have strayed away from the straight and narrow path pioneered by the Civil Rights Movement and the moral culture which produced it,” said Enzi.

Reverend Steven Louis Craft was no less blunt in his statement. “As a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, who happens to be Black by His design, I am thoroughly outraged that Obama would think he could even suggest, no less implement, such madness as ‘gender identity’ and ‘transgender rights’!”

D.C. lobbyist Gianno Caldwell said that the edict showed that “President Obama continues to focus his priorities on everything but the American people. Instead of focusing on the struggling economy or any number of issues plaguing our country, he decides to legalize sexual harassment. Any male individual can claim an identity in the moment to follow a woman into the bathroom, thereby creating an harassing environment. This must be stopped by Congress.”

St. Louis political consultant Christopher Arps said the administration’s move was an abuse of constitutional power. “Just as the liberals use the Commerce Clause to justify any kind of tax or government overreach, now they abuse civil rights codes to justify legalizing any kind of perversion, all in name of equality. Civil rights champions were not spat upon, beaten with police batons and sometimes murdered for the right of men to go to the same restroom with little girls.”

The group’s Co-Chairman, Horace Cooper, said that the administration is attempting to accomplish its agenda “by threatening to punish the most vulnerable students in public school — withholding lunch and remedial teaching assistance from poor and minority students. This is cruel and divisive and will ultimately be overturned.”

Right Reverend Council Nedd II, Ph.D., asked “why is there such a rush to strip away the innocence of American children? Why do children need to be exposed to anything and everything at the earliest possible age? Do we really want our children growing up in a world and age where nothing is taboo?”