by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News October 2, 2024
The West Point School Board in Virginia on Monday agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys fees to a high school teacher who was fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
In addition to the financial settlement, the school board agreed to change its policies and clear teacher Peter Vlaming’s firing from its record.
The agreement comes nearly a year after Virginia’s Supreme Court reinstated Vlaming’s lawsuit, which was filed by the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (AFD).
A French teacher, Vlaming had taught in the district for seven years when he was fired in 2018 for failing to use a student’s requested pronouns that were “inconsistent with the student’s sex.”
“I loved teaching French and gracefully tried to accommodate every student in my class, but I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience,” Vlaming said, adding that he was wrongfully terminated because of his religious beliefs that are protected by the First Amendment.
“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.”
ADF attorneys filed the lawsuit in September 2019.
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In December, the Virginia Supreme Court reinstated Vlaming’s lawsuit, claiming school administrators violated his right to exercise his religion freely.
“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 last year’s majority opinion.
West Point Public Schools has agreed to change its rules and conform to Virginia’s new education policies, which call for respecting free speech and parental rights.
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