There is good news to report this week on the protection of religious liberty and free speech claims in Virginia.
In 2018, teacher Peter Vlaming was fired from his job for declining, as a matter of personal policy, to use pronouns for a student who identifies as transgender. Vlaming has successfully resolved his case in a settlement announced Monday.
In exchange for ending his lawsuit against the West Point, Virginia school board, Vlaming will receive $575,000 in damages and legal fees and a change of school district policies according to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) the Christian legal organization representing Vlaming after he was wrongly fired for declining to use inaccurate pronouns. His termination will be removed from his record.
“No government should force its employees (or anyone else) to voice their allegiance to an ideology that violates their deepest beliefs,” ADF stated in a tweet following the negotiated settlement.
The Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Rick Plasterer wrote on the case in 2023 after the Virginia Supreme Court granted Vlaming’s petition to reinstate the case that had been earlier dismissed by a lower court. The state Supreme Court remanded the case to a lower court for a ruling in line with the state Supreme Court’s decision supportive of Vlaming’s religious liberty and free speech claims.
Vlaming, an Anglican Christian attending Incarnation Church in Williamsburg, made a direct appeal to religious liberty.
“I was wrongfully fired from my teaching job because my religious beliefs put me on a collision course with school administrators who mandated that teachers ascribe to only one perspective on gender identity—their preferred view,” Vlaming stated. “I loved teaching French and gracefully tried to accommodate every student in my class, but I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience.”
Christians can be grateful in this victory against forced speech. Notably, Vlaming was fired in 2018 not for something he said, but for declining to state something that he did not believe: forced speech.
Vlaming’s courage to stand up for his beliefs against pressure from the transgender movement and its drive for mandatory social affirmation and freedom from offense will have a lasting effect in Virginia’s constitutional law in favor of religious and conscience freedoms.
