Virginia School District Pays $575K Settlement for Firing Teacher Over Refusal to Use Transgender Pronouns

A Win for Religious Freedom.

A Virginia school district has agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Peter Vlaming, a former teacher fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns on religious grounds. The settlement includes damages, attorney fees, and the removal of Vlaming’s dismissal from his record. Vlaming’s legal team argued that the firing violated his First Amendment rights. The case highlights tensions between religious freedom and policies on gender identity in schools.

Details.

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Embrace, Don’t Affirm

“Banned Books Week” Hypocrisy

In a recent article, Used Book Store owner John B. Kuhner critiques the irony of “Banned Books Week,” noting that many featured books are not banned but heavily promoted and required reading.

He argues that the event has become a marketing ploy and a tool for ideological gatekeeping rather than a defense of free expression. Hypocrisy arises as the same entities that decry “banned books” often support the suppression of titles like Irreversible Damage, by Abigail Shrier and author Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. 

“Banned Books Week” ends up protecting mainstream opinions while ignoring genuine censorship issues.

You can read more about this hypocrisy at: First Things.

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Flying the ‘True Colors’ Flag Now

Progressives’ response to Hamas’s atrocities reveals that they never believed in their own dogma.

Woke dogma, that is…

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile.

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that“neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

For more than a decade now, our universities, our media, our HR departments, and our celebrities have terrorized us with a bunch of vicious dogmas that, it turns out, they never believed in for a moment. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “equity” and any other abstract concept that might plausibly be recruited to the obscurantists’ side, Americans were asked to subordinate their freedom, their conversations, and their consciences to the personal preferences of a handful of unelected arbiters of taste. And then, one terrible day in October, a real barbarity was staged, and, within a few hours of the rules being applied to its apologists, the whole enterprise was revealed to be a brittle sham. 

It has been about the Far Left gaining Power all along…and the silencing of those who disagree with their worldview.

Read the whole thing.

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