The Daily Signal - French Teacher Fired for Rejecting Personal Pronouns Wins Lawsuit Almost 6 Years Later

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

French teacher Peter Vlaming was fired in 2018 for shunning the use of pronouns to refer to a transgender-identifying student. On Sept. 30, the West Point School Board in Virginia agreed to pay him $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. "I'm so relieved that our basic fundamental rights of freedom of expression, of freedom of religion have been formally upheld," Vlaming told The Daily Signal. The School Board cleared Vlaming’s termination from his record and changed its policies to conform to the new Virginia education policies established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va. Vlaming is a Christian, so he believes God created male and female. Still, the teacher was willing to respect the rights of his students to disagree. When one of his female students started identifying as male, Vlaming avoided referring to her with pronouns, instead using her preferred name. On Halloween of 2018, his students participated in a virtual reality tour of French catacombs, during which the transgender-identifying student almost ran into a wall.  "Don't let her hit the wall!" Vlaming called out instinctively. The student called her parents, who complained to the school. Vlaming was placed on administrative leave and given an ultimatum that he would be fired if he didn't use preferred personal pronouns. Vlaming refused to comply and was fired. Nearly six years later, Vlaming, represented by the religious liberty nonprofit law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, won his case. "Stand your ground with love," Vlaming advises other teachers. "Stand your ground. Live truthfully with love. You'll give others courage as well. At least that's what I hope and pray for." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nothing else is Rees. I'm Elizabeth Mitchell, and this is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, October 15th. I sat down with Virginia French teacher Peter Vlaming, who was fired from his job after failing to use a student's preferred personal pronouns. He was recently awarded $575,000 by a Virginia court for his wrongful termination. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Peter Vlaming and his lawyer from Alliance Defending Freedom after this. This is Rob Lewy from The Daily Signal. In today's media landscape, it's more important than ever to have a trusted source of news and conservative commentary. That's why we are asking for your support.

Your donation helps us continue our mission of delivering accurate, factual reporting on the issues that matter most to you. Whether it's $5 or $500, every contribution makes a difference. Visit dailysignal.com slash donate to help us keep Americans informed and fight for conservative values. The Daily Signal is your voice for the truth. Peter, what's your background as a teacher? Okay, sure. So I'll back up a little bit and say that I always wanted to learn foreign languages when I was, when I was small, when I was young, and the first opportunity I had was in junior high, and I loved French. I have some French heritage. I found that I love the way French sounded. It was for me, and I know for many Americans, I associate French with history, philosophy,

art, and just kind of being cultured. And I thought that, well, if I can have a veneer of sophistication, that would be great. And I just continued learning all through high school and college and then finally taught in high school, started teaching in high school. So I'm a high school French teacher. When did you first encounter the school you were teaching at its pronoun policy? I didn't even know it existed until after the fact. It wasn't something that was clearly announced. And so, yeah, I wasn't even aware of it. It was only when things got complicated with my administration that there was talk of this pronoun policy. And what was that situation? like when you became aware of the policy?

Well, the whole case and the whole scenario revolved around a changing my language. I had a student who decided to start identify, a girl who started identifying as a boy. I adopted the student's new first name, her preferred first name. but when it came to third person personal pronouns, which, you know, as a language teacher, these are things I think about. A third person personal pronoun designates someone's sex. So I wasn't able in good conscience to do that because she wasn't a boy. She was a girl.

And I didn't want to, nor did I want to promote or play along with what I considered to be a huge lie, kind of coming over our culture in America. And so I explained to my administration how I was going to handle this. Like, hey, this is, I don't agree with the ideology, but here's how I can do this. I can talk. I can use the student's new name, which I'm already doing. And I'll avoid using feminine pronouns to refer to her in her presence. And then, but I won't, I'm not going to use math.

masculine pronouns because for me that's really participating in a big lie that's hurting everybody. And it was starting there where the administration says, no, you can't do that. You have to use whatever pronouns the student wants. And even when the student's not present, if it's just us in an office like we are now, you have to refer to this student as he. And I couldn't agree. Do you have a religious objection to the ideology behind preferred personal pronouns? Yeah, the whole ideology is trying to hijack the language so that it's funny how it's almost

like short-circuiting a discussion on the question. Instead of saying, okay, let's have a discussion about what is, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? What does sex mean? Can sex be divorced from? how we are physically or by biology, it's taking away even the discussion and imposing language saying, no, you're just going to start speaking as though you already believe this. And that's basically, it's the equivalent of what I would, like in 1984, the thought

police, or as we commonly refer to totalitarianism, you know, governing one's thoughts. And so religiously, it's, as a Bible-believing Christian, you don't just go with the flow. You don't just go along to get along in everything. If there's something that's promoting something that's objectively not congruent with reality, doesn't reflect reality, you don't just go along. You say, well, no, this isn't true. This isn't true. And so, no, I'm not going to promote it.

Why do you believe that teachers everywhere should have the right to decline to use pronouns that differ from a student's biological sex? Well, this goes back to some of the founding principles of whether it be Virginia, America, or Western society in general, being able to think things through, being able to hold an opinion without fear of being punished, without fear of, yeah, of being punished, of being, uh, uh, there, they're being retribution for not going along with what authorities to say. Um, that's just, that's just part of this is, it's funny. It's even the fact that that we have to talk about this is still to this day, it's surprising me like, how did we get here? I'm bewildered at why this is a question. Okay, you want to believe, you want to believe in this new ideology about what it is to be a man or a woman. You know,

the essence of human nature, okay, is our sex tied to our soul or our mind in regards to if we're a man or woman? Okay, you want to go a different way with that. That's fine. I'll respect your, your rights to believe the way you want. But it wasn't going the other way. way. I was compelled to believe exactly the same way. My student believed in her family had decided to believe and that the school had adopted, the whole school had adopted one view on this topic that five minutes earlier in human history, no one agreed with. What happened that caused you to lose your job at that school? Now, you couldn't make this stuff up. I had already been given a basically an ultimatum, a spoken ultimatum by my principal.

It was Halloween. We had a half a day of school. And I did a special lesson on the catacombs in Paris. So in Paris, you have these underground tunnels where exhumed when, okay, in Paris, there was a time where the city didn't have enough room to bury the dead. And they had to exhum skeletons to make room. And so to honor those skeletons, they stack them up neatly in certain tunnels under the city and you can visit them.

And I found a way to do a virtual tour of the catacombs on Halloween. So it was a little lesson. Here's how this happened. Here's what it is. And you could, we had a set of several virtual reality goggles. And so I divided my students up in pairs where one. One would have the virtual reality goggles on. We were out in the hallway just outside the classroom and then their partner would make

sure they wouldn't walk into anything as they virtually toured the catacombs with the virtual reality goggles. And so the student in question was walking towards a wall and her partner wasn't paying attention. I'm just surveying, I'm just keeping an eye on everybody. And I realized the partner wasn't paying attention and she was about to run into a wall. And I, as a reflex shouted out, don't let her hit the wall. And the fact that I said her was this spark to a powder keg that was already there where she called her parents and I was someone to the office. And then it was only after that that it was that day I was put on administrative leave.

and then finally given a written ultimatum by my superintendent, saying that, which included the phrase, well, the essence of which was, if we think that you're substituting the student's new name, instead of using a he, you know, personal pronoun when you could, you know, if we think that you're doing a substitution, that will be grounds for your firing as well. I mean, it was really absurd. And so, yeah, that's why I said, well, no, I'm not going to sign this and do your best. And they did. They fired me. What was it like to lose your job in such a shocking way? Shocking is the key word. I would use the same way. I was shocked mostly because it just seems so obvious to me. Like, everyone knows that I like this student, I'm not going to adopt and promote transgender ideology. That's all. And I'm not going to

even pronounce what I think about it. I'm just going to keep my conscience clear. I'm going to avoid referring to her as a boy. And even, I'd like to add, in the classroom, it's not difficult because in the classroom I say, hi, Elizabeth, how are you doing? I don't say, hi, Elizabeth, how is she doing? You know, it just doesn't work that way. To impose third person personal pronouns is really to try to control how you're thinking, to make sure that you're on board with this new way of, this new thought. And so I was kind of just like I was jaw dropped at the ridiculousness of it. And also saddened because I really think that if just a couple teachers would have stood up and said,

Listen, Mr. So-and-so of principal, you know, or superintendent, you know Mr. Blamming's a good teacher. You know he likes his students. You know he likes this student. It has nothing to do with being discriminatory or harassing that has nothing to do with this. I really think they would have backed down. But there was this huge intimidation factor. Everyone just kind of knew, yeah, if you don't go along with this, you're going to be in big trouble. And I'm like, I can't do that.

I don't just, as a Christian, we don't just go along with things. What has your life been like since this happened? Yeah, these are huge questions. What has my life been like? Okay, so some, like I just said, I was, I was jaw dropped immediately afterwards. Because also I was formally, you know, formally branded as, as a harasser and a discriminator, which was just like absurd. It was so absurd.

However, immediately after friends came to my aid, a good buddy, unbeknownst to me, he had started a GoFundMe account and got the word out. We lived from, we lived frugally, but I was, you know, my wife was at home with our four children, our four small children, and I was the only Brethrener, and we lived check to check. And I didn't know how we were going to pay our mortgage. But the following day, I saw that there was this GoFundMe account and there was already money. And so we had enough to keep going. But then after that, it was there, I looked to see if there were other French teaching jobs in an area and there were.

But because of what had happened at my school, I had been blacklisted. No one wanted to touch me with the 10 foot pole because it's so controversial. And I could go into detail about that, how one school actually even onboarded me. And then they found out, oh, wait a minute, you were, you know, you were let go by this other school. Oh, sorry, we have to, with a rescind our offer. And so I had to make, we had to make some decisions as a family. What are we going to do? So I went into another line of work.

I finished my master's degree. I was in the middle of a master's in school administration at the College of William and Mary. I was able to finish that. Thank you, Lord. A local Christian school helped me out with what I needed to do that. And I did some odd jobs. I got into another career field before my wife and I, we decided to move back to France. My wife is French, and we had an opportunity to come back here. So we did. And what is ADF's argument in this case on behalf of Peter's right to refer to? students how he believes is correct. The core fundamental issue is that a government can't compel you to lie or threaten you with punishment if you don't lie. And that's exactly what Peter talked about what happened in this case. He went out of his way to accommodate this student, but it wasn't enough for the school board. The school board said you have to use the words, you have to express a viewpoint

that you know is wrong in order to stay here. And that shouldn't be the case in any part of America. It's very clear, and we're thankful the Virginia Supreme Court made it absolutely clear here in Virginia, that the Constitution protects the right to free speech, not to be compelled to speak a message that you disagree with. As Peter talked about that kind of ideology saying you have to say those words, you have to express this belief, that's totalitarianism. That's not tolerance. Tolerance should be a two-way street where we agree to disagree, but we don't compel someone to speak a message, which with they disagree. And that's exactly what the school board tried to do here. We're thankful the Virginia Supreme Court said, no, not in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We're hopeful

that spreads throughout the country. Could you summarize the court's recent ruling on this case? Sure. The court addressed two major issues. There's additional issues in the case as well. You even mentioned, you know, when did Peter become aware of this policy? The court noted there wasn't even a real policy and existence. The school made it up and then used it to fire him. So that was a constitutional issue for sure. But the major issues were the religious liberty and the free speech aspects of it. Virginia has a storied history of free exercise going back to debates between Thomas, we have Thomas Jefferson who was involved. Madison and Mason were debating. How do we deal with religious minority viewpoints or majority viewpoints? And they came to the conclusion

that the government should not get involved with compelling someone to violate their conscience. And they made that very clear in the Virginia Constitution. They also addressed for the first time how does this, the free speech clause apply to public employees. And certainly the government has an interest in having their employees speak the government's message, right, when you're talking about a curriculum. But this wasn't a curricular issue. This was an ideological issue. And courts across the country, the United States Supreme Court, and now the Virginia Supreme Court has made clear that you can't compel someone to speak a lie in order to keep their job.

There's a line that the government can't cross. Even when you're a government employee, they can't make you tell a lie. And that's really the foundation and core of what the court held in this case. What could this ruling mean for free speech and religious freedom rights nationwide? We're already seeing an impact here in Virginia. and then cases across the country are starting to cite this Virginia Supreme Court case as well, because it really is groundbreaking on this issue. And we think courts around the country,

and even the United States Supreme Court has wrestled with, how do we apply faithfully the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause in the U.S. Constitution? Current justices have expressed that they disagree with how it has been applied for the last few decades, that they don't think it's faithful to the founding text. I think what the Virginia Supreme Court here did creates a model that the U.S. Supreme Court can follow to balance the government's interest and yet not allow it to impose this ideological test on public officials. Peter, what advice do you have to teachers in situations like yours where they're feeling

compelled to lie about a student's gender, but they have free speech or religious objections to doing so? Don't go along. Don't go along. Take courage. Be courageous. I'm not saying to be provocative, but stand your ground. You can stand your ground and be truthful without being, without being obnoxious, without being, it's not obnoxious to be truthful. It's not obnoxious to not go along. I do think that my posture was a healthy one. Listen, I love all my students, including this student. Do I agree with everything my students do? No, and we're not supposed to. And I didn't agree with what this student was doing. But it wasn't, in this case, it wasn't my place to give her advice on this, and I didn't.

So with regards to other teachers in the situation, just stand your ground with love. You know, stand your ground, live truthfully with love. You'll give others courage as well. But at least that's what I hope and pray for. Because if people don't stand up and say, no, we're not going along with totalitarianism, it just keeps on going. It's like a steamroller. It won't stop until someone says, I'm not doing this.

I'm not going along with this. So I would encourage other teachers in my situation, yes, to take a stand. And how has this ruling that we just saw changed your life? Oh, I'm just, I'm so relieved. I'm so relieved that our very basic fundamental rights of freedom of expression, of freedom of religion have been upheld, have been formally upheld. That is a huge relief. Like to think that it, that there was a chance that it wouldn't be and that the court would have gone along and said, yeah, well, you know, no, this is, this has to do with, I don't know, adjusting to. the age, I'm just making stuff up, that would have been crushing.

And so I'm very relieved that our basic rights as American citizens, as Virginia and American citizens were upheld. Awesome. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Daily Signal Podcasts interview edition, where I discussed religious freedom and free speech with Peter Vlaming and his lawyer

from Alliance Defending Freedom. Be sure to tune in later today to our top news edition, where I'll outline the headlines of the day. Have a great morning and we'll be back with you at 5 o'clock tonight. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph Von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work,

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