Big win for the First Amendment in Virginia
Washington Examiner
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Even with the American Civil Liberties Union fighting against civil rights, the cause of freedom of conscience won a big victory this week against a Virginia school board’s attempt at mandatory wokeness. Lady Justice (she/her) surely is smiling.
Even 20 years ago, the situation at issue in Vlaming v. West Point School Board would have seemed like a dystopian alternative reality. Peter Vlaming was a high school French teacher with six years of experience and consistently positive evaluations. The school board fired him, however, when he refused to refer to a biological female by the male pronouns she preferred, even though Vlaming readily referred to her by her self-chosen, male-sounding name and did not use pronouns at all.
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Even though Vlaming explained that his religious beliefs precluded him from calling a biological girl a boy, the board would not relent. It said that Vlaming was not only forbidden to use pronouns that contradicted the student’s chosen “identity” but that he had no right to avoid pronouns altogether. Instead, it said, he was required to use pronouns that proactively affirmed the student’s anatomically incorrect gender predilection.
Therefore, even though he was an excellent teacher, the school board fired him. And when he filed suit saying that his free speech and free exercise of religion rights were violated, the ACLU filed a brief against him. Never mind the teacher’s First Amendment rights, said the supposed guardian group of the First Amendment. The student’s right to avoid “discrimination,” said the left-wing group, had been somehow violated by the teacher’s refusal to use masculine pronouns.
By that logic, if a teacher otherwise treated one student like all the others (in terms of class participation, grades, or whatever) but refused to comply when that student wanted to be publicly referred to as a leopard, well, would the ACLU still allege discrimination?
The Virginia Supreme Court rightly swatted down both the school board and the ACLU. It ruled that the school board had violated both the Virginia state constitution and the Virginia Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our sense is that if this case had been in federal courts, the board also would have been found in violation of the well-established prohibition of “compelled speech,” as the right not to speak is as equally protected by the First Amendment as the right to speak freely.
“Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these [founding] principles [of the state and nation] can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs,” wrote Justice D. Arthur Kelsey for the Virginia Supreme Court majority. As the Virginia constitution clearly says, “religion … can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
Therefore, the state could not “direct” Mr. Vlaming to use pronouns that his religion tells him are “objectively untrue,” as his faith teaches that “sex is fixed in each person, and that it cannot be changed, regardless of feelings or desires.”
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This shouldn’t be complicated. To repeat: Absent truly extraordinary circumstances involving “some substantial threat to public safety, peace, or order,” no entity of government can compel someone to include specific content when speaking, especially when that content violates his faith. That is the single most basic bedrock of human rights and of the American polity. Moreover, the court noted that the Virginia Constitution, with its provisions on religion dating to 1776, actually is even more protective of religious liberty than is the United States Constitution.
New fads, such as self-chosen pronouns, cannot outweigh fundamental human rights. Just as the Virginia Supreme Court reaffirmed that principle last week, so should every court in the land.