While most people probably agree free speech is an important right, liberals and the media often express disagreement, even disdain, over high-profile cases that involve government or school employees and their personal views — especially if they’re rooted in religion.
Lower and higher education systems have followed this trend and seem to think they can mandate their employees’ speech, especially if the person happens to have religious beliefs. However, a recent development in such a case shows that despite media smears or liberal misrepresentations, free speech is always worth a fight, and public employees should not be muzzled.
On Monday, the Loudoun County School Board agreed to settle its case against teacher Tanner Cross about the kind of free speech rights liberals deem unworthy of protection. The school board agreed to a permanent injunction prohibiting the school from retaliating against Cross for expressing his views opposing the board’s transgender policy.
Several months ago, the Leesburg Elementary School teacher voiced his opposition to the school’s transgender policies at a school board meeting. The policy requires school staff, teachers, and students to refer to transgender students by their “preferred pronouns.” Loudoun County Public Schools suspended and banned Cross from Loudoun County Public Schools property and events. Later, a lower court ruled the suspension violated his First Amendment rights, and in September, the Virginia Supreme Court agreed.
In the settlement, the Loudoun County School Board agreed to remove any reference to Cross’s suspension from his personnel file and pay $20,000 toward Cross’s attorneys’ fees. The lawsuit challenging the school’s transgender policy is still active and includes Tanner and two other teachers.
“Teachers shouldn’t be forced to promote ideologies that are harmful to their students and that they believe are false, and they certainly shouldn’t be silenced from commenting at public meetings,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, in a statement.
In the last decade, the idea that government employees don’t have the same free speech rights as private employees has become popular. K-12 education and higher education systems began to embrace this, throwing down mandates or threatening to fire teachers if they expressed their own core (often religious) beliefs that happened to contradict a school’s new policy about a controversial political issue. This should never have become a trend.
Lawsuits like this, followed by a settlement that undoubtedly stings for the Loudoun County School Board, prove this model of thinking is morally wrong and legally fragile: Public employees are not wards of the state, mandated to operate in the public sector without their own core values intact. However unpopular they may have become, free speech issues are worth fighting for in the public square. Sometimes, you get a solid win that makes it worthwhile.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
