In a victory for free speech rights against government-compelled speech, the Virginia Supreme Court yesterday vindicated Peter Vlaming and upheld his First Amendment rights not to speak messages that he doesn’t agree with. This case asks whether schools can force teachers to use preferred pronouns that contradict a student’s biological sex.
Peter Vlaming taught public high school for years, until his school suspended and ultimately fired him over his refusal to use a biological female’s preferred male pronouns. Despite the fact Peter worked to avoid using any pronouns to address the student in order to avoid drawing attention, the school demanded ideological conformity.
The school insisted Peter not just avoid using pronouns, but to actively affirm that the student was now a male through his speech.
Peter, in good conscience, could not do that. When he accidentally shouted, “Don’t let her hit the wall!” during an activity when the student in question nearly walked into a wall, the school suspended Peter the next day. The school eventually fired him. Peter sued the school for violating his free speech rights by compelling him to use language with which he disagreed.
The lower courts dismissed that lawsuit. Yesterday, however, thanks to the Virginia Supreme Court, that lawsuit will be reinstated. But that’s not all. The justices did not merely permit the case to move forward—they issued a robust opinion of the school’s treatment of Peter Vlaming. From the opinion:
The concept of “gender identity” is among many “controversial subjects” that are rightly perceived as “sensitive political topics.” Speech on such matters occupies the “‘highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values’ and merits ‘special protection.’” The ideological nature of gender-identity-based pronouns involves a palpable “struggle over the social control of language in a crucial debate about the nature and foundation, or indeed real existence, of the sexes.”
Compelling an educator’s “speech or silence” on such a divisive issue would cast “a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom” on a topic that has “produced a passionate political and social debate.” Whether at the highest or lowest level, the government has no inherent power to declare by ipse dixit that controversial ideas are now uncontroversial. After all, the “freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” [Emphasis added]
Mountain States Legal Foundation is proud to have supported Peter in filing an amicus brief, urging the Virginia Supreme Court to do exactly what it did today. MSLF First Amendment senior attorney James Kerwin said, “The victory for Peter Vlaming is particularly important because the court called out the big lie being told by many schools and other institutions. Forcing Americans to affirmatively say they believe a girl is now a boy (or vice versa) is not primarily about protecting children’s self-esteem, it is about requiring others to mouth adherence to a quasi-religious message preferred by the government; the message that sex isn’t real, and that anyone can switch at any time just by thinking it so.”
