Pushback: Fired teacher wins $575K free speech settlement from school board
Peter Vlaming
Fight! Fight! Fight! In 2018 Peter Vlaming, a long time French teacher in the West Point School District in Virgina was fired because he would not use the preferred pro-nouns of one of his students. The firing was especially offensive in that Vlaming had done everything reasonable to accommodate the student, including using her preferred male-sounding name while avoiding the use of pronouns. He just could not use male pronouns for a female student. It violated his core beliefs.
The school board considered his silence on this point abusive to the student, and fired him. In 2019 he sued, and on September 30, 2024 his attorneys from the non-profit legal firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom, won him a $575K settlement from school board.
[T]he West Point School Board has agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. In addition, the school board cleared Peter Vlaming’s firing from his record, and separate from the settlement agreement, changed its policies to conform to the new Virginia education policies established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that respect fundamental free speech and parental rights.
The victory is one of many that have been stacking up in the last two years after the blacklisting madness of the past decade. In almost every case, the blacklisting and censorship were not only morally wrong, such actions violated numerous laws, beginning with the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In this particular case, a lower court initially dismissed Vlaming’s suit, claiming that protecting the feelings of queer students superceded the First Amendement. On appeal the Virginia Supreme Court threw out [pdf] that dismissal, noting bluntly…
that the Virginia Constitution “seeks to protect diversity of thought, diversity of speech, diversity of religion, and diversity of opinion.” The ruling continued, “Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
That ruling devoted many pages reviewing the history of both our Bill of Rights and the Virginia constitution, both written by our Founding Fathers. It is a shame the members of the West Point School District, its lawyers, as well as the lower Virginia court that dismissed Vlaming’s case, were unaware of this very basic legal history. It was inevitable from the start that a firing like Vlaming’s was going to end up costing the school board a lot of money. Why at a minumim the board’s lawyers did not note this prior to the firing is not just baffling, it is downright appalling.
The tragedy for Vlaming is that though he has won some financial retribution, he no longer has a job that he loved, and it took six years of legal hassles to get that victory. In this sense, you could say the school board (as well as the LBGQTBIPOCABCDEFG…etc community) was actually the winner. One can’t help wondering what teaching has been like at this public school district since Vlaming’s firing. I suspect the queer agenda has been installed in all programs, and even with this victory it now holds a controlling position in all teaching modules.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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Peter Vlaming
Fight! Fight! Fight! In 2018 Peter Vlaming, a long time French teacher in the West Point School District in Virgina was fired because he would not use the preferred pro-nouns of one of his students. The firing was especially offensive in that Vlaming had done everything reasonable to accommodate the student, including using her preferred male-sounding name while avoiding the use of pronouns. He just could not use male pronouns for a female student. It violated his core beliefs.
The school board considered his silence on this point abusive to the student, and fired him. In 2019 he sued, and on September 30, 2024 his attorneys from the non-profit legal firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom, won him a $575K settlement from school board.
[T]he West Point School Board has agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. In addition, the school board cleared Peter Vlaming’s firing from his record, and separate from the settlement agreement, changed its policies to conform to the new Virginia education policies established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that respect fundamental free speech and parental rights.
The victory is one of many that have been stacking up in the last two years after the blacklisting madness of the past decade. In almost every case, the blacklisting and censorship were not only morally wrong, such actions violated numerous laws, beginning with the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In this particular case, a lower court initially dismissed Vlaming’s suit, claiming that protecting the feelings of queer students superceded the First Amendement. On appeal the Virginia Supreme Court threw out [pdf] that dismissal, noting bluntly…
that the Virginia Constitution “seeks to protect diversity of thought, diversity of speech, diversity of religion, and diversity of opinion.” The ruling continued, “Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
That ruling devoted many pages reviewing the history of both our Bill of Rights and the Virginia constitution, both written by our Founding Fathers. It is a shame the members of the West Point School District, its lawyers, as well as the lower Virginia court that dismissed Vlaming’s case, were unaware of this very basic legal history. It was inevitable from the start that a firing like Vlaming’s was going to end up costing the school board a lot of money. Why at a minumim the board’s lawyers did not note this prior to the firing is not just baffling, it is downright appalling.
The tragedy for Vlaming is that though he has won some financial retribution, he no longer has a job that he loved, and it took six years of legal hassles to get that victory. In this sense, you could say the school board (as well as the LBGQTBIPOCABCDEFG…etc community) was actually the winner. One can’t help wondering what teaching has been like at this public school district since Vlaming’s firing. I suspect the queer agenda has been installed in all programs, and even with this victory it now holds a controlling position in all teaching modules.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
It is ALL related:
TODAYS MONEY HEADLINE: POLITICAL TREASON
“The federal government under the control of the Joe Biden / Kamala Harris administration (D) has run out of money for Americans in need after a major natural disaster. Why? Because they spent the money on their political “Investment” importing “NEW” illegal immigrant Democrats in the millions into the country.”
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/todays-money-headline-political-treason
Robert writes, “It is a shame the members of the West Point School District, its lawyers, as well as the lower Virginia court that dismissed Vlaming’s case, were unaware of this very basic legal history.”
I would suggest that it is not so much that they don’t know this history — how could they not? — but, rather, they want to totally erase it. For these people, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are impediments to the establishment of the kind of one party authoritarian state (“Our Democracy”) that they long for, so of course they must be ignored and their legitimacy called into question at every point.
After all that has happened over the last eight years, many people still believe that “progressive” Democrats merely want to *reform* our institutions in order to make life more fair and equitable for average Americans through the expansion of the government, sort of like Minnesota, as Governor Walz describes life there. Likewise, such obsolete, “going too far” notions as free speech* must be modified as necessary to protect the fundamental rights of minorities and marginalized people and to preclude the chance that disinformation might be spread. Rainbows and unicorns, with a little help from the Thought Police.
Unhappily, the radical left’s goals extend far beyond creating a European-style social welfare system in this country, and they will not be satisfied until Americans find themselves living in something not unlike Cuba, Communist China, or even (heart be still) North Korea.
*For a stirring defense of this idea, see the transcript of Matt Taibbi’s address at the “Rescue the Republic” rally in Washington:
https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the
Mr. Taibbi and his colleagues “get it,” and they are trying to spread the word.
Sometimes I ponder that this Covid-19 pandemic affected more than respiratory (and gastric) systems. Would seem it also took the average IQ down by 19 points. How else to explain the utterly stupid decisions being made routinely these days?
Seriously, a contest over pronouns ends in a dismissal? One that clearly would lead to a loosing court case? So predictable as to underline the stupidity of it all.
And one more wry observation. The nitwits that made these bad decisions from the beginning, they are not on hook for the half mil due the wronged party. No, We the People will pick up that tab. The nitwits may suffer un-election, or they might carry on as if nothing untoward had occurred.