A teacher in Virgina has been fired for refusing to use the preferred pronoun of a trans student who went from female to male. His refusal was based on his Christian faith:
CBN NEWS – Peter Vlaming was a well-liked French teacher at West Point High School in Virginia. But late last year, Vlaming was fired because he refused to call a ninth-grade student who transitioned from female to male by the student’s new preferred pronoun, “he.”
“I could not, in good conscience based on my Christian faith, call a girl a boy,” Vlaming said.
Vlaming agreed to use the student’s new name. But since he wouldn’t refer to the biological girl as “he” or “him,” he was placed on administrative leave in October of 2018.
“I was told that not only would I pronounce masculine pronouns when referring to the student when students were present, [but] that I would do so even when students weren’t present. I was given a written ultimatum that insisted that I use masculine pronouns for the student and that I would be fired if they deemed that I was avoiding the use of masculine pronouns,” Vlaming said.
Two months later, the school board made its decision.
“I had a hearing on December 6th,” Vlaming told CBN News. “And it was long. It was a four-hour hearing. Afterward, The West Point public school board unanimously voted to fire me.”
The teacher agreed to call the student by their new name. But the school board forced him to use the ‘pronoun’, even in private, and when he didn’t he was summarily fired.
The students who loved the teacher were outraged and staged a walkout:
Students at the school were outraged. Forrest Rhode, a West Point junior, rallied students to protest Vlaming’s firing by staging a walkout.
“I would say we had like 150 people out there,” Rhode said. “And we had them all circling around there, marching, chanting, ranting all that type of stuff.”
Rhode called the school’s treatment of the French teacher unfair and felt he needed to act.
“I did the oath of enlistment a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to be joining the Marine Corps,” Rhode said. “And I’m going to be defending people’s rights to express themselves and I’m going to be defending the Constitution. And that’s really important to me. I want to make sure everybody’s rights are protected.”
According to CBN News, he’s been out of work for 6 months and no other schools will even give him an interview – despite him being offered several jobs in surrounding schools before all of this happened. Sounds like they are blackballing him.
The French teacher is appealing the decision by the school.
As we’ve been saying all along, this is what happens when you give the LGBT community rights. It’s zero sum, because when you give LGBTers rights, you take away the rights of Christians to disagree and they are the ones being persecuted in all of this.