The Obama administration has issued a new directive to the nation’s public schools stating that they must allow boys who identify as girls to share restrooms and locker rooms with girls. Ditto girls who identify as boys. It’s executive overreach at its worst, and in the most misguided and disordered of causes.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said in a news conference this morning that he would be instructing school superintendents in Texas not to comply with the directive. “This will be the end of public education, if this prevails,” Patrick said. “People will pull their kids out, homeschooling will explode, private schools will increase.”

He’s not alone. Christian author and radio host Michael Brown has called for national civil disobedience to the new Obama directive. And Fox News & Commentary host Todd Starnes has issued a similar call.

Obama’s Orwellian ‘Guidance’

The Obama administration is billing the move as “guidance,” perhaps to create the warm and fuzzy impression that it is just a wise and guiding handing from good old Uncle Sam. However, Education Secretary John B. King said public schools are required to comply with Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), commented, “Even though the Department will say that guidance does not have the force of law, every school district in the country will be terrified of going against a federal agenda.”

The Obama administration is claiming that this bizarre directive is somehow an organic and rational extension of Title IX, which was primarily designed to to open up sports to girls in public schools, not girls’ bathrooms to confused males — some of whom, like Bruce Jenner, are still sexually attracted to females.

In essence, the Obama administration is using Title IX for a fig leaf to cover a brazen bit of top-down social engineering, and to make this new directive anything but a mere suggestion. It essentially is warning public schools that if they do not comply, the federal government will withhold funding. It is a backhanded or disguised mandate, similar to how Common Core was forced on public schools. Schools in states that refused to implement Common Core were denied key funding.

Obama’s History of Executive Overreach

Obama, of course, has a history of exercising executive authority to implement major policies, an abuse of his power since it goes around Congress in ways the American Founders never intended the president to do (thus that whole, clever separation-of-powers thing they built into the Constitution).

Obama’s myriad of mandates isn’t easy to track because not all of them are done as “executive orders.” Some are given different names like “executive action.” Yes, Obama has issued fewer executive orders than George W. Bush, but many of the orders Bush issued were mundane. They did not, for instance, upend centuries of common-sense practice for protecting male and female privacy in public bathrooms.

Sen. Lankford criticized the administration for encroaching onto the legislative branch’s lawmaking powers:

The Obama Department of Education’s guidance letter on the use of public school bathrooms is another example of how they have continued to create law out of thin air with Dear Colleague letters, threats and intimidation. They have continually shown a pattern of federal overreach and bullying of schools while attempting to force their ideology outside of the legal requirements for creating policy. The proposal in today’s guidance is so significant and groundbreaking, it should only be considered by legislation, preferably at the local level, instead of through a Department of Education guidance letter.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is actively challenging the policy in other venues. Senior Counsel Jeremy Tedesco issued this statement about the directive:

The administration’s new guidelines simply reinforce what has been abundantly clear already — that it has a political goal of forcing women to share restrooms and locker rooms with men across the nation and will spread falsehoods about federal law to achieve its aims. This is precisely why we have filed two federal lawsuits, one in Illinois and one in North Carolina, on behalf of parents and students who are understandably concerned about their children. Solutions exist to accommodate everyone without violating anyone’s privacy rights, but the administration won’t entertain those solutions because of its preference to unlawfully impose its political will through threats and intimidation.

With states like Texas revolting, and litigation already in progress around the country over similar mandates, the issue will likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court to decide its constitutionality.

Follow Rachel Alexander on Twitter at @Rach_IC.