Federal judge blocks Arkansas trans youth treatment ban

LITTLE ROCK — A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of Arkansas’ ban on gender confirming treatments for transgender youth while a lawsuit challenging the prohibition proceeds.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in May asking U.S.

District Judge Jay Moody in Little Rock to strike down the law that made Arkansas the first state to forbid doctors from providing gender confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or sex reassignment surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for such treatment. The ACLU sought the preliminary injunction while its lawsuit proceeded.

Moody found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed with their challenge and that allowing it to be enforced would hurt transgender youth currently receiving the treatments.

“To pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm,” Moody said.

The law had been set to take effect July 28.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of four transgender youths and their families, as well as two doctors who provide gender confirming treatments.

The lawsuit argues that the prohibition would severely harm transgender youth in the state and violate their constitutional rights.

“This ruling sends a clear message to states across the country that gender affirming care is life-saving care, and we won’t let politicians in Arkansas – or anywhere else – take it away,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas.

An attorney for the ACLU had said the ban was forcing some families to consider uprooting from their homes to move to other states where the care was legal.

“This care has given me confidence that I didn’t know I had,” Dylan Brandt, a 15-year-old transgender boy from Greenwood who is one of the plaintiffs, said at at a news conference after the ruling.

Arkansas’ Republicandominated Legislature overrode GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto of the measure. Hutchinson vetoed the ban following pleas from pediatricians, social workers and the parents of transgender youths who said it would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide.

Hutchinson said the ruling indicates the law will be struck down for the same reason he vetoed it.

“The act was too extreme and did not provide any relief for those young people currently undergoing hormone treatment with the consent of their parents and under the care of a physician,” Hutchinson said in a statement. “If the act would have been more limited, such as prohibiting sex reassignment surgery for those under 18, then I suspect the outcome would have been different.”

There are currently no doctors in Arkansas who perform such surgeries on minors.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican, said she planned to appeal the decision.

“I will aggressively defend Arkansas’s law, which strongly limits permanent, life-altering sex changes to adolescents,” Rutledge said. “I will not sit idly by while radical groups such as the ACLU use our children as pawns for their own social agenda.”

Moody issued the ruling shortly after hearing arguments from the law’s opponents and the state for about an hour and a half.

The judge appeared skeptical of the state’s argument that the ban was targeting the procedure, not transgender people. For example, he questioned why a minor born as a male should be allowed to receive testosterone but not one who was born female “How do you justify giving that to one sex but not the other and not call that sex discrimination?” Moody asked.

Arkansas argued that the state has a legitimate interest in banning the procedures for minors.

Republican attorneys general from 17 states asked Moody to uphold the ban.

Several major medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, filed a brief with the court challenging the ban. The state Chamber of Commerce and the Walton Family Foundation, which was founded by relatives of Arkansas-based Walmart’s founder, also asked the court to block the ban.

***

LITTLE ROCK — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked an Arkansas law banning nearly all abortions in the state while she hears a challenge to its constitutionality.

U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the law, which was set to take effect on July 28. The measure was passed this year by the majority-Republican Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The ban allows the proce-

Continued on Page 14 STATE NEWS (cont.)

dure to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency and does not provide exceptions for those impregnated in an act of rape or incest.

Baker called the law “categorically unconstitutional” since it would ban the procedure before the fetus is considered viable.

“Since the record at this stage of the proceedings indicates that women seeking abortions in Arkansas face an imminent threat to their constitutional rights, the court concludes that they will suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief,” she wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court in May agreed to take up a case about whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb, a showdown that could dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on the procedure.

That case, which focuses on a Mississippi law banning abortion 15 weeks into a woman’s pregnancy, probably will be argued in the fall, with a decision likely in the spring of 2022. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and several other states, encouraged by former President Donald Trump’s appointments to the high court, enacted new abortion bans even before that case was announced. A South Carolina law enacted this year that bans abortions six weeks into a woman’s pregnancy has been temporarily blocked due to a court challenge.

The bans were pushed by Republicans who want to force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, which had challenged the outright ban, hailed Baker’s decision. The groups are suing on behalf of Little Rock Family Planning Services, a Little Rock abortion clinic, and Planned Parenthood’s Little Rock health center. The groups are also representing a doctor who works at the Planned Parenthood clinic.

“We’re relieved that the court has blocked another cruel and harmful attempt to criminalize abortion care and intrude on Arkansans’ deeply personal medical decisions,” ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director Holly Dickson said in a statement.

Brandon Hill, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said Baker’s decision “demonstrates that the court fully understands the harmful and immediate effects this law would have on Arkansans.”

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican whose office had defended the law, was disappointed with Baker’s decision, a spokeswoman said.

“She will be reviewing it to consider the appropriate next step to protect the life of the unborn,” spokeswoman

said in an email.

Arkansas this year enacted 20 abortion restrictions, the most in a single state since Louisiana adopted that many in 1978, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.

Arkansas already had some of the strictest abortion measures in the country and two years ago Hutchinson signed into law a measure that would ban the procedure if the Roe decision was overturned. STATE NEWS (cont.)

Another measure Hutchinson signed in 2019 banning abortions after 18 weeks of pregnancy is on hold due to a legal challenge.

Hutchinson on Tuesday night said he hoped the case over Arkansas’ neartotal ban would ultimately go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This legislation had the dual purpose of protecting Arkansas’ unborn and challenging long-standing Supreme Court precedent regarding abortion,” he said in a statement. “I hope the Supreme Court will ultimately accept this case for review” ***

GREENE COUNTY— Greene County sheriff’s deputies have arrested a Paragould man on felony battering charges.

They arrested Dale Allen McLeskey, 42, on charges of one count each of second- degree domestic battering, a Class C felony; and first-degree terroristic threatening, a Class D felony.

According to a probable cause affidavit sworn by Detective Sgt. Don Crittenden of the department’s Criminal Investigation Division, the arrest took place July 12, after deputies had responded to a dispute/argument at a house.

Upon their arrival, the deputies made contact with the victim (McLeskey’s father). At that time, he reportedly told them Dale McLeskey had showed up and was asking for money.

His father, however, reportedly refused, to give him any money. It was at that time, the victim said, that McLeskey picked up a gasoline can and poured it on him as well as on his vehicle. McLeskey reportedly then began yelling at the victim threatening to cut his throat with a knife.

The victim then called 911, at which time McLeskey fled the scene.

He was later apprehended, and remains in the Greene County Detention Center (GCDC) on a $20,000 bond.