Imagine living under tyrants who not only forbid you to speak the truth but who demand that you state indisputable lies in violation of your conscience. That will be America if the American “Civil Liberties” Union has its way. Fortunately, this malevolent organization has suffered a setback in Virginia in the case of Vlaming v. West Point School Board:

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.

Refraining from calling her “her” wasn’t good enough. Vlaming was commanded to kneel before the Alphabet Mob by actively calling her “him.”

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.

So they 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.

In open hostility to basic civil rights, the ACLU proclaimed that it constitutes “discrimination” for him not to reject his faith and biological reality to cater to her deranged if trendy whims.

This time there was a happy ending:

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.

Let’s hope so. But the longer Democrats are in a position to place leftist apparatchiks on the bench, the less likely this is to be the case.

The ACLU reminds us that moonbats know they are wrong, or they would not talk in Orwellian euphemisms. If killing your offspring in the womb is good, why call it “reproductive healthcare”? If sex change surgery is good, why call it “gender-affirming care”? If bigotry against whites, men, and Christians is good, why call it “inclusion”? If tyranny is good, why call it “civil liberties”?

On a tip from Blackjack.

Comments are closed.