CV NEWS FEED // The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday ruled to reinstate the lawsuit of a Virginia high school teacher who was fired for refusing to use a “transgender” student’s preferred pronouns.
French teacher Peter Vlaming filed the lawsuit after West Point High School fired him. The suit alleges that the West Point School Board violated Vlaming’s right to free speech and religious freedom. A lower court rejected the lawsuit. Vlaming is a Christian.
The West Point School Board fired Vlaming in 2018 after he refused to use male pronouns in reference to a girl who said she was a boy. Vlaming had taught French for more than six years at West Point High School.
The non-profit law firm Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represented Vlaming.
“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” ADF Senior Counsel Chris Schandevel stated in a Thursday press release. Schandevel argued before the court on behalf of Vlaming.
“As a teacher, Peter was passionate about the subject he taught, was well-liked by his students, and did his best to accommodate their needs and requests,” continued Schandevel. “But he couldn’t in good conscience speak messages that he doesn’t believe to be true, and no school board or government official can punish someone for that reason.”
The VA Supreme Court recognized that the state constitution “seeks to protect diversity of thought, diversity of speech, diversity of religion, and diversity of opinion.”
“Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, 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,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority decision.
The lawsuit alleges that the school fired Vlaming in spite of his good-faith attempts to respect the student by avoiding using pronouns at all.
“Vlaming tried to accommodate the student by consistently using the student’s new preferred [male] name and by avoiding the use of pronouns altogether,” the ADF press release noted. “But school officials ordered him to stop avoiding the use of pronouns to refer to the student, even when the student wasn’t present, and to start using pronouns inconsistent with the student’s sex.”
The school board argued that Vlaming was fired for violating school policies against discrimination and harassment based on gender identity. The judge in the local King William Circuit Court granted the school board’s motion to dismiss Vlaming’s suit before it went to trial.
After Vlaming appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, the court agreed that the lower court should not have dismissed the case.