A Virginia school board has agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a former teacher fired for refusing to use his transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
We covered the teacher’s case against the school here:
Peter Vlaming was a popular French teacher at West Point High School for almost seven years when he was suspended in 2018 for violating the school’s transgender pronoun policy. He was willing to use his transgender student’s preferred name, but avoided using third-person pronouns altogether. The school then warned him that refusing to say the student’s preferred pronouns violated its policy prohibiting discrimination and harassment based on gender identity. As a matter of conviction, he would not do so, and it cost him his job.
As the Virginia Supreme Court later put it, Vlaming was fired “not because of what he said but because of what he refused to say.”
Represented by The Alliance Defending Freedom, Vlaming sued the West Point School Board in 2019 for violating his civil rights. After years of litigation over whether he had a viable claim, the Virginia Supreme Court revived Vlaming’s lawsuit at the end of last year, sending it back to the trial court that dismissed it.
Writing for the state’s high court, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey made clear that the constitutional right to free speech “includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.”
“Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so,” Judge Kelsey continued, “no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
In a statement announcing the settlement, ADF said that in addition to paying $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, the school board agreed to clear Vlaming’s firing from his record.
The school board also agreed, in a separate development, to conform its polices to Virginia’s new guidelines protecting free speech and parental rights to be informed about their child’s wellbeing, ADF announced.
Vlaming said,”I was wrongfully fired from my teaching job because my religious beliefs put me on a collision course with school administrators who mandated that teachers ascribe to only one perspective on gender identity—their preferred view.” He hopes his victory will help protect other teachers from being fired by their schools for exercising their constitutionally protected free speech and religious rights.
Now that the settlement has been made public, schools know that if they do, it could come at a whopping price.
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