Biden’s Department of Education has granted Baylor University a religious exemption to Title IX provisions that hold schools accountable for sexual harassment against LGBTQ students, despite the university’s troubling history of alleged Title IX violations. The letters requesting and granting the exemption were dated May 1 and July 25, respectively, but didn’t receive widespread attention until after a tweet thread from the Religious Exemption Accountability Project about the letters went viral last week. The exemption protects Baylor from complaints that would cause other schools to lose their federal funding. 

Baylor’s letter, signed by President Linda Livingstone, noted that the university was requesting an exemption in response to three complaints made to the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights: one about the decision to deny a charter for a queer student group, another about the school’s unsatisfactory response to students’ claims they were harassed based on their gender identity and sexual orientation, and a third based on allegations that the university pressured media outlets not to cover campus LGBTQ activism during […]