(Oct. 13)  On matters related to gender transitions, pornographic material in school libraries, and other cultural hot points, courts all over the country increasingly, and rightly, are upholding both parental rights and First Amendment speech and religious rights.

Consider news just in the past fortnight, some involving favorable judicial decisions and some featuring favorable settlements.

The victorious cases

[kpolls]

In Virginia, the West Point School Board in late September paid a $575,000 cash settlement to, cleared the record of, and rehired French teacher Peter Vlaming, who had been fired because he would not refer to students with pronouns different from that of their biological sex. Vlaming, whose record otherwise was excellent, was willing to use a student’s new “preferred name” — “Patricia” instead of “Patrick,” or whatever — when addressing the student, but he said his faith did not allow him to call a boy a girl. His reasonable solution was to avoid pronouns altogether, but the school board fired him anyway.

Last December, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the school board was wrong in trying to compel speech and in trying to force Vlaming to violate his faith. The courts wrote that the government and its subsidiaries (such as public schools) cannot “lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.” For a government entity to require a teacher to violate his faith or else lose his job is essentially no different than for it to create a religious test for employment, which is patently unconstitutional.

Nonetheless, it took another round of court proceedings for Vlaming actually to be made whole, but after last month’s settlement, he has been. Better yet, the schools were forced to change their policy, for the better, going forward.

The second big win came in Pennsylvania, where on Sept. 30, a federal district court ruled in Tatel, Dunn, and Melton v. Mt. Lebanon School District that parents have the right to be told of, and to opt their first grade children out of, lessons wherein a teacher taught that “gender identity” is something that parents merely “make a guess about” when the child is born and that “sometimes parents are wrong.” As with the Virginia teacher’s case, the question isn’t about the merits of transgender ideology but about the rights of people to express or act on beliefs opposed to that ideology.

This mirrors a state court victory from almost exactly a year ago…. [The full column is here.]