The Patriot Post® · A Big Win for Religious Liberty and Common Sense

If we as a nation and a people ultimately step back from the brink of societal ruin, we may look back one day and see a turning point in the case of Peter Vlaming.

Vlaming, a highly regarded high school French teacher in West Point, Virginia, had been fired over his refusal to use a student’s so-called preferred pronouns. One day in 2018, one of his biologically female students delivered Vlaming a handwritten note in which she claimed to be male and requested that he begin to address her by a new male name. Vlaming agreed, and he did so whenever he addressed her, but he avoided using the student’s preferred pronouns. As he put it in a 12-minute video from The Daily Signal: “I respect the student’s right to adopt this new identity. I respect the right of her family to believe the same. But I can only follow them so far. I cannot in good conscience refer to a girl as a boy.”

Vlaming’s accommodation, though, wasn’t good enough for the student or her parents or, ultimately, the school’s administrators. He was told that not only should he actively use male pronouns in this student’s presence but also when the student wasn’t present.

In short, Vlaming wasn’t merely being told not to say things he sincerely believed; he was being told to say things he didn’t believe. He wouldn’t budge on his deeply held religious principles, though, and he was ultimately fired by the West Point School Board in a shamefully unanimous 5-0 vote — this despite a stellar seven-year record of teaching at the high school.

According to school superintendent Laura Abel: “Mr. Vlaming was recommended for termination due to his insubordination and repeated refusal to comply with directives made to him by multiple WPPS administrators. That discrimination then leads to creating a hostile learning environment. And the student had expressed that. The parent had expressed that. They felt disrespected.”

As The Daily Signal reports: “Vlaming then sued the West Point School Board in 2019, asserting constitutional, statutory, and breach-of-contract claims. While a lower court dismissed Vlaming’s claims, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed, sending Vlaming’s lawsuit back down to the trial court so that his case against the school board can proceed.”

Vlaming’s case was picked up by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal organization that fights for religious freedom, free speech, the sanctity of life, marriage and family, and parental rights. As the ADF’s Caleb Dalton argues:

Peter went out of his way to accommodate this student as he does all his students; his school fired him because he wouldn’t contradict his core beliefs. The school board didn’t care how well Peter treated this student. It was on a crusade to compel conformity. He works hard to make his students feel welcomed. In his French class, he always calls his students by the name they choose. He even used the student’s preferred masculine name and was willing to avoid using pronouns in the student’s presence. He just didn’t want to be forced to use a pronoun that offends his conscience. That’s entirely reasonable, and it’s his constitutionally protected right. Tolerance, after all, is a two-way street.

Indeed, tolerance is a two-way street. And there’s nothing tolerant about compelled speech. As ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer put it: “This isn’t just about a pronoun. It’s about what that pronoun means. This was never about anything Peter said or did; only about what the school was demanding he say. Nobody should be forced to contradict his core beliefs just to keep a job.”

On Thursday, the Virginia Supreme Court spoke resoundingly in favor of the First Amendment, ruling that Vlaming’s lawsuit against the school board could be reinstated. Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey put it this way: “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.”

Compelled speech is one of the signs of a sick society. That the Virginia Supreme Court recognizes this is a good thing, but that a school system — any school system — saw fit to fire a teacher for refusing to utter falsehoods is deeply troubling.

If we’re to overcome the “societal malware” that currently infects us, it needs to start with our First Amendment.