Sen. Marco Rubio has once again called out the Biden administration for pushing its wokeness on a seemingly nonpartisan issue: counting people.
The Florida Republican, joined by Ohio GOP Sen. J.D. Vance, sent a letter to the head of the U.S. Census Bureau asking why the agency was asking teenagers and others questions about gender identity.
According to the letter Rubio and Vance sent on Friday to Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, the agency in September sought permission from the White House to test questions about gender identity for respondents over age 15 in the American Community Survey, or ACS, which they called “the bureau’s most extensive survey on American life.”
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The bureau reportedly requested $10 million “to study the best way to present such questions with the purported intent of testing out the wording, placement, and response categories to analyze the differences between ‘LGBTQ+ people,’” the senators wrote.
The ACS’s proposed gender-identity test questions would ask respondents what sex the person was assigned at birth and what they feel their current gender is now.
“It is troubling that the Census Bureau is attempting to politicize the survey by including highly polarizing and patently false topics, like gender identity,” the lawmakers noted in the letter.
“Biology determines gender, not subjective belief, and the bureau should not jeopardize the legitimacy of crucial statistical information by endorsing unscientific and untrue concepts like gender identity.”:
Generations of Americans, they added, have looked to the census as an “unbiased, authoritative source describing the objective reality of life in America.”
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The ACS, in particular, collects near-real time data on topics such as age, sex, education levels, employment status, disability status, and internet access. That information “plays a critical role in informing officials and leaders within communities about their constituents,” the senators noted.
“It is not worth sacrificing this trust to advance controversial social ideas through government surveys,” they continued.
“It’s important to recognize that the notion of ‘gender identity’ is unscientific, subjective, and political. Those who promote the concept themselves admit that gender identity is fluid and may be changed by an individual on a whim,” Rubio and Vance argued.
“However, common sense and basic biology tell us that gender is not a matter of subjective belief; it is rooted in objective reality. How an individual chooses to express themselves is a matter of personality, not ‘gender identity.’”
In addition to that problem with the ACS, questioning minors about their “gender identity” could mislead them into thinking “that the concept is valid and backed by the U.S. government—which it emphatically is not,” the lawmakers maintained.
On the other hand, they wrote, if the Census Bureau seeks information about the “dramatic and troubling rise” in gender dysphoria, it can do so by simply asking respondents if they “suffer” from gender dysphoria in addition to asking about their sex, meaning either male or female.
“The Census Bureau should not lend credence or official weight to a false concept like gender identity, or it will damage its credibility as an authoritative statistical body,” said Rubio and Vance.
“Official government surveys should reflect objective reality. Gender identity is a harmful ideology being pushed by the Bureau to politicize the ACS. Further, presenting respondents with classifications regarding false gender identities rather than focusing solely on one’s biological gender is not beneficial to our ability to analyze data and to subsequently use such data to further the interests of communities.”
“Given these facts,” they concluded, “we urge the Census Bureau to withdraw any request to include notions of or questions pertaining to gender identity on the ACS.”
Six months ago, Rubio fired off a letter to Santos questioning why the agency was trying to redefine poverty along “longstanding progressive political priorities.”
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At the time, Rubio noted that the Census Bureau sought to factor childcare and health insurance data into the poverty equation, which would “significantly increase the complexity of a threshold that already yields more than 46,000 different definitions of poverty.”
Rubio also pointed out that the Census Bureau was relying on a change recommended by a study committee whose members gave almost $110,000 to Democratic candidates and causes and $0 to Republican candidates and causes.
“None of the panelists had a record of public service for Republican politicians or conservative organizations,” he wrote. “In light of these facts, it is hard to see how any individual could reasonably estimate the composition of the panel meets the NAS’ [National Academy of Sciences] purported standard of ‘objectivity,’” Rubio wrote.
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