RICHMOND, Va. — A lawsuit filed by a Virginia high school teacher who was fired after he refused to use a transgender student’s pronouns was reinstated Thursday by the state Supreme Court.
Peter Vlaming, a former French teacher at West Point High School, took legal action after he was fired in 2018 for not using a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. His lawsuit, brought by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, alleged that the school violated his constitutional right to speak freely and exercise his religion. The school board argued that Vlaming violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.
All seven justices of the state Supreme Court agreed that two of Vlaming’s claims should move forward to trial: his claim that his right to freely exercise his religion was violated under the Virginia constitution and his breach of contract claim against the school board.
“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 the majority opinion, joined by three other justices.
But the court was split on some aspects of the lawsuit. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas Mann, joined by two other justices, wrote that the majority’s opinion on Vlaming’s free-exercise-of-religion claim was overly broad and “establishes a sweeping super scrutiny standard with the potential to shield any person’s objection to practically any policy or law by claiming a religious justification for their failure to follow either.”
L. Steven Emmert, an appellate attorney and publisher of the website Virginia Appellate News & Analysis, said the main dispute between the majority and the dissenting justices “is the extent to which the individual’s beliefs can overcome the government’s interests.”
Vlaming’s attorney, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Christopher Schandevel, said Vlaming was well-liked by his students and “did his best to accommodate their needs and requests.”