One teacher from Ohio has slammed her former school with a lawsuit in the wake of being forced to quit her job all due to a refusal to use the new gender identity pronouns of students, she claims.
24-year-old Vivian Geraghty, formerly an English teacher, has officially filed a lawsuit targeting Jackson Memorial Middle School south of Columbus. She alleges that officials for the school district forced her out of her job because she stated that her Christian religious beliefs prevent her from using students’ preferred pronouns.
The legal suit from the teacher, which saw its filing in a federal court last week, claims that the school directly retaliated against her for expressing her right to free speech along with the wholesale violation of he right to practice her Christian religion. The lawsuit also directly calls out the education board and two school district employees.
Geraghty fully resigned from her teaching role roughly one week later on the 26th of August, as stated in the lawsuit.
The problem kicked off when a pair of students requested that Geraghty now use their new names to go along “with their new gender identities rather than their legal names.” On of these particular students also asked that the teachers and staff also use their new preferred pronouns, explains the lawsuit.
Geraghty went directly to the school administration in hopes of finding a solution, but the principal and his superior, the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, explained to her that “she would be required to put her beliefs aside as a public servant,” alleges the suit. She was then allegedly accused of being insubordinate and told that her continued employment as a teacher without doing exactly as she was told in regard to the student’s gender transition would “not work in a district like Jackson.”
She was told that if she would not take part then she would be required to resign from her role, explains the lawsuit.
The teacher attempted to explain to the principal that forcing her to resign was an overt violation of her free speech, but her boss just repeated that due to being a public servant she needs to “set [her] religious convictions aside” or quit. At which point the principals boss handed the reacher a laptop while ordering her to write out her letter of resignation right there, stated the suit.
“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” explained Logan Spena, the attorney for the ADF. “The school tried to force Vivian to recite as true the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students. The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power.”
