I remember how it was -- JR
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Does a Teacher Have a Right to Refuse to Call a Girl a Boy? Virginia’s Supreme Court May Decide
In 2018, a female student told teacher Peter Vlaming that she was transgender and wanted to be called by a masculine name. He agreed to call his student by the new name, but explained to the principal that he could not in good conscience use male pronouns for a female student. He was fired. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
A Virginia teacher was fired for refusing to call a girl a boy. Now, the state’s Supreme Court has the opportunity to decide whether a local school board violated the teacher’s legal rights.
A lawyer for French teacher Peter Vlaming asked Tuesday that the Virginia Supreme Court take up the case, Vlaming v. West Point School Board.
“No government can force any Virginian to express messages that violate their core beliefs,” Chris Schandevel told The Daily Signal after arguing for Vlaming before Virginia’s highest court.
Schandevel, a lawyer with the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the court “to reinstate the lawsuit that [Vlaming] filed in state trial court,” which dismissed the case without explanation last August.
As previously reported by The Daily Signal, the West Point School Board fired Vlaming in December 2018 after he declined to use male pronouns to refer to a female student who identified as a transgender male.
Almost a year later, Vlaming filed a lawsuit against the West Point School Board for breach of contract, arguing that the body violated his rights under the Virginia Constitution.
“Mr. Vlaming was not fired for something he said; he was fired for something that he could not say based on his religious beliefs,” Schandevel argued Tuesday.
“This is a case about compelled speech,” he said.
Lawyers for the West Point School Board did not present an argument before the Virginia Supreme Court.
Before being terminated, Vlaming taught French for seven years at West Point High School, about 40 miles east of Richmond.
In 2018, the female student in question gave the teacher a letter saying she was transgender and wanted to be called by a new masculine name. Vlaming agreed to call the student by the new name, but explained to his principal that he “couldn’t in good conscience pronounce masculine pronouns to refer to a girl,” he told The Daily Signal during an interview in 2020.
Vlaming said he tried to avoid using female pronouns with the student, but in the fall of 2018, he accidentally called the student “she” in front of the class. The same day, Vlaming was called to his principal’s office and put on administrative leave.
Superintendent Laura Abel said Vlaming could return to teach at West Point High if he would use male pronouns proactively to refer to the female student. Vlaming again explained that he could not in good conscience refer to a female as a male.
Abel recommended that Vlaming be fired, and the school board voted 5-0 to terminate him.
Vlaming loved teaching and was well liked by students. Some students spoke out in his defense after he was fired.
“I had huge support—students who truly came to my side and parents who came to my side to encourage me, to express their support,” Vlaming told “The Daily Signal Podcast” during a September 2021 interview.
His lawyer says that Vlaming, a father of four, has not been able to find a job at another public school because of his termination. He is seeking $1 million in damages.
If the Virginia Supreme Court takes up Vlaming’s case, arguments likely would be scheduled for the fall, Schandevel said.
“We’re very optimistic that they’re going to take the case,” Schandevel said. “And once they do take the case, we’re likewise equally optimistic that they will rule in Peter’s favor.”
In America, “protections for free speech and for free exercise of religion are just foundational for the functioning of our democracy,” Schandevel told The Daily Signal, “and this is a very important case to affirm that for all Virginians.”
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San Diego County School Retracts ‘Wheel of Privilege’ Teaching Tool
A school in San Diego County claims it has removed a “Wheel of Privilege” graphic from its professional development training materials after the image was exposed on social media and parents objected.
The image was touted as part of professional development training by the Black Mountain Middle School in Poway Unified School District (PUSD), according to the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), whose executive director posted the graphic on Twitter.
The “Wheel of Power/Privilege” teaching tool was designed to rank people by power and privilege based on skin color, body size, and gender identity, as well as citizenship, language, wealth, and other factors.
CFER stated in a Feb. 9 newsletter that it was “alarmed by such a such divisive narrative, rooted in critical race theory (CRT) and intended for middle-schoolers.”
“We exposed the issue on social media. In the meantime, PUSD parents and residents contacted the school leadership to demand explanations,” CFER stated.
The school’s principal, Scott Corso, indicated in an email sent to a parent on Feb. 7 that the graphic was shared as one idea at a Big IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity Equity Awareness) committee meeting “for a future professional growth day with educators.” The virtual meeting was open to the public.
“After further reflection on feedback received and working with Shawntanet Jara, PUSD Director of Equity and Improvement, we have modified our activities. We have decided not to use the graphic entitled ‘Wheel of Privilege,’ nor the video related to intersectionality,” Corso said in the email obtained by The Epoch Times.
Corso claimed in the email that the school is not teaching CRT.
“We have no interest in promoting Critical Race Theory. That is not our intent,” he wrote. “Our intent, as educators, is to examine our own personal biases in order to support all students and be the most inclusive school we can be.”
CFER disagrees.
“While the education establishment stubbornly denies their engagement with CRT, mounting evidence shows otherwise,” CFER stated in its newsletter.
“By now, it’s a moot point,” Wenyuan Wu, CFER’s executive director, told The Epoch Times on Feb. 9.
“We’re not talking about teaching critical race theory as a legal doctrine or legal hypothesis. We’re talking about propagating and inculcating key tenets of critical race theory such as race essentialism, intersectionality, and anti-racism as a bandage or solution to all observed problems in our society,” Wu said.
The claim CRT isn’t being promoted or is not “widely taught” in California schools is more than just an argument of semantics, Wu suggested. Rather, she contends, it’s a deliberate subversive tactic the “education establishment” commonly uses to hide from parents that they’re teaching “pseudoscientific ideas” based on the tenets of CRT to their children.
“Call it whatever you want. Call it Mickey Mouse. It does not change the fact that it’s teaching or indoctrinating our kids with very bad illiberal and un-American ideas about race in our society,” Wu said.
CFER sees the removal of the “Wheel of Power/Privilege” as small victory in its battle against CRT concepts. It encourages a “robust rebuttal to the narrative of victimhood and disempowerment.”
The next Big IDEA meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 6 p.m. on Zoom, Corso said in the email.
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Maryland Legislature Considers Creating ‘Advisory Council’ to Collect Data on Homeschoolers
If we have learned anything about left-wing cultural revolutionaries over the past few years and decades, it’s that they insist that all conform to their view of “diversity.”
All are welcome, except for those who disagree.
That’s why it’s so troubling to see government authorities rope in, and attempt to control, people attempting to maintain their independence.
Maryland Delegate Sheila Ruth, a Baltimore County Democrat, recently proposed legislation in the Maryland House of Delegates that would create a deeply worrisome “advisory council” to watch over and gather data on homeschool families.
The 16-seat council would be staffed by four political appointees, four government officials, and eight members of the homeschool community. It would “gather information on the needs of homeschool parents and homeschool umbrella schools,” and would effectively sweep homeschool parents under the wing of a government agency.
This is precisely the sort of thing many homeschool parents wanted to avoid when they chose that path for their children in the first place.
Bethany Mandel, a conservative writer and homeschool mother living in Maryland, raised the alarm about this legislation and called out Ruth on Twitter.
In a message to The Daily Signal, Mandel explained why the legislation is so troubling.
The advisory council—whatever its current stated intent—could easily be used to browbeat homeschool families.
“They’ll pass more restrictive rules on us and say, ‘It was suggested by homeschooling families themselves! We have a council!’ (That they chose.),” Mandel wrote.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, a legal support group for homeschoolers based in neighboring Virginia, also warned about the potential for abuse by the proposed advisory board.
“This bill would create a quasi-official source for information on homeschooling, which would, in turn, minimize the effectiveness of grassroots homeschool groups and individual advocates,” HSLDA noted in a statement.
Homeschooling has thrived for decades without government assistance. Instead of creating a new bureaucratic entity to gather information on the needs of homeschool programs, HSLDA encourages government entities and actors to respect homeschooling programs by preserving liberty and avoiding unnecessary regulation.
The legislation was so worrisome that a group of members of the Maryland General Assembly called for the bill to be withdrawn.
The letter said that the advisory board would put an enormous amount of power in the hands “of just a few partisan political appointees” and that a 16-person advisory panel in no way could represent the diverse opinions of homeschool families in Maryland.
A Change.org petition calling on Ruth to withdraw HB 832 is seeking 2,500 signatures, and as of this writing, it has garnered nearly 1,700.
As troubling as the legislation is, it’s not happening in a vacuum.
Another piece of legislation, introduced in January, demonstrates the radical plans in store for the state’s public schools. House Bill 352 aims to create an American Studies and Social Equity Standards Advisory Board.
The purpose of the bill would be to redirect examinations of history in schools to be framed around race and ethnicity.
It essentially would mandate a laundry list of diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements for public schools in the state. One of the bill’s sponsors said it wasn’t “a critical race theory bill,” which is almost laughable. This legislation uses almost every buzzword imaginable related to critical race theory, just without literally saying “critical race theory.”
Clearly, Maryland legislators think their constituents are stupid.
Just as bad, evidence suggests that they will leave no stone unturned to bring leftist indoctrination to every K-12 public school student in the state.
It isn’t just happening at the state level.
Maryland’s largest school district, Montgomery County Public Schools, is going through an “Antiracist System Audit.” The interim superintendent, Monifa McKnight, recently released an update, announcing that Montgomery County school curriculums will now all flow “through an antiracist lens,” especially in social studies.
This comes from the Montgomery County Public Schools website:
This summer, a cross-office team was charged with creating a long-term plan to transform curriculum and develop interconnected and interdisciplinary learning experiences for students, PreK-12 that strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves as change agents.
What this is effectively announcing is that the public schools are for the revolution, one based on racial essentialism, and they will be indoctrinating your kids to be loyal foot soldiers in the cause.
Oh, but weren’t we informed by left-wing media commentators that critical race theory isn’t in schools, and that it’s just a figment of our imaginations?
The fact is, this sort of pedagogy is being introduced and enforced around the country. The left-wing media can spin and twist and try to deny it, but parents are catching on to this being the reality.
That matters very much when considering Maryland’s proposed homeschool advisory board. Given the transformation of institutions—especially public schools—into engines of wokeness, it’s not hard to see how malicious such a governmental board could become.
An agency constructed to “gather information” and staffed by political appointees could quickly turn into a governmental hammer to bludgeon homeschool parents into looping their children into the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It should be no surprise that this effort comes as parents around the country have begun to protest the curriculums and policies of public schools, both for their embrace of critical race theory—or whatever they want to call its associated ideas—and absurdly restrictive COVID-19 policies.
The left’s attitude is that they have an inherent right to indoctrinate your children. Any attempt to stop them from doing so, from within the public school system or from without, is treated as illegitimate.
That’s why what’s happening in Maryland is so concerning and a sign of things to come.
They want you and your family to comply with the cultural revolution that’s sweeping our institutions. They won’t let you go. They don’t want you to have a choice until all your choices are the same.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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