In the never-ending fight against denials of religious liberty and of basic biology and anatomy, credit the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal aid group, for another interim but important victory.
A federal district court in Kansas granted a preliminary injunction on May 9 in favor of Pamela Ricard, a middle school math teacher and Alliance Defending Freedom client, in her case against the Geary County Schools Board of Education concerning gender-identity communications. The school system has a policy requiring teachers to call students by personally “preferred” names and pronouns matching the gender each student “identifies” as but then requires that when teachers communicate with parents, they use the given name and original gender pronoun.
In sum, the policy requires the teacher to kowtow to a child’s wishes but keep the parents in the dark about the child’s decision to identify as a different gender. The school thus requires the teacher to support gender-bending while lying to the parents about it. Thus does the state, through the public school system, encourage gender transitioning of minors without parental front-end consultation, much less consent.
Ricard sued, explaining that she, in the court’s language, “believes that addressing students one way at school and a different way when speaking to their parents is dishonest. Being dishonest violates her sincere religious beliefs.” She also said that using the “preferred” pronouns in class, regardless of what she communicates to parents, violates her religious beliefs, but the court decided to issue no injunction on that part of the suit, pending further legal arguments.
Judge Holly Teeter, who clerked for judges appointed by Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and who earned bipartisan, unanimous confirmation for the bench when nominated by former President Donald Trump, issued an injunction in Ricard’s favor on the question of being dishonest to parents. She ruled that the policy burdens Ricard’s right to free exercise of religion. “The court finds plaintiffs’ testimony concerning her religious beliefs to be credible and subjectively sincere,” Teeter wrote. Further, the judge wrote that Ricard is sincere in her “belief that parents have a fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children.”
Even the school’s interactive website actively conceals from parents the fact of their children’s “preferences.” The system allows parents to access certain information about their children. Yet when it comes to preferred names and gender identity, only administrators and teachers can see that a child has chosen something other than the original name his or her parents gave them. After further analysis of how that site and the overall parental-communication system works in practice, Teeter again found that the policy discriminates against Ricard’s exercise of her faith.
Amid other indications, including the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, arguing in favor of the teacher and of the parents’ rights to know, Teeter found also that the school district’s policy “is an impermissible one because it is intended to interfere with the parents’ exercise of a constitutional right to raise children as they see fit.”
Thus, this lawsuit about First Amendment religious rights could also, if this decision stands, further enshrine parental rights into federal court precedents.
Ricard is right to stand up for her rights, and the Alliance Defending Freedom is right to stand with her. In defending her rights, the Alliance Defending Freedom may actually achieve a twofer that will make not just school employees but also parents more secure in their sacred prerogatives.
