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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAn Indiana school district did not violate a former music teacher’s rights by pushing him to resign after the man refused to use transgender students’ names and gender pronouns, a federal appeals court said in an order released Friday.
The decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a prior ruling in the case by a federal judge.
According to court records, John Kluge was hired in 2014 as the music and orchestra teacher for Brownsburg High School about 20 miles northwest of Indianapolis. In 2017, district officials began requiring the high school’s teachers to use the names and pronouns listed in the school’s official student database, where changes were permitted with letters from a student’s parent and a doctor.
Kluge told the school’s principal, Bret Daghe, on the first day of classes for the 2017 school year that he had a religious objection to using transgender students’ names and pronouns. District officials agreed that Kluge could call students by their last name and would not be responsible for handing out orchestra clothing.
But at least two transgender students reported that Kluge’s refusal to use their first names singled them out in front of peers and was hurtful. Other students, teachers and counselors also told officials that the issue made Kluge’s classroom uncomfortable for many.
In January, the district told teachers that everyone would be required to use the names and pronouns listed for students in the database. In response to Kluge questioning whether the rule would also apply to him, officials told him he could abide by it, resign or be fired.
Kluge resigned and then sued the school for religious discrimination.
An Indiana federal judge ruled that Kluge’s refusal to use transgender students’ names and pronouns created an undue hardship on the district, which is responsible for educating all of its students.
The appeals court agreed, writing that district officials tried to accommodate Kluge’s religious objection but realized that letting the music teacher use last names “resulted in students feeling disrespected, targeted, and dehumanized, and in disruptions to the learning environment.”
“Brownsburg has demonstrated as a matter of law that the requested accommodation worked an undue burden on the school’s educational mission by harming transgender students and negatively impacting the learning environment for transgender students, for other students in Kluge’s classes and in the school generally, and for faculty,” the opinion read.
Rory Gray, an attorney with the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, is representing Kluge and said they are considering next steps.
“Congress passed Title VII to prevent employers from forcing workers to abandon their beliefs to keep their jobs,” Gray said in a statement. “In this case, Mr. Kluge went out of his way to accommodate his students and treat them all with respect. The school district even permitted this accommodation before unlawfully punishing Mr. Kluge for his religious beliefs.”
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What religion does Mr. Kluge follow – the First Church of Tilting at Windmills or the United Moronic Crusaders? From Wikipedia “One of ADF’s goals is for Christianity to be written into the US legal system, based on their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In materials they share with donors, ADF says that they seek to spread a belief in “the framers’ original intent for the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as it reflects God’s natural law and God’s higher law.”
Also from Wikipedia, ADF donors get fleeced to provide a comfy lifestyle for the promoters “In 2020, ADF founder Alan Sears was compensated over $803,000 and President Michael Farris was compensated $455,000.[3] In 2021, Farris made $503,000 and Sears $486,000, while the current President, CEO, and General Counsel, Kristen Waggoner, was compensated $337,000.”
Seriously? Wikipedia?
Why are you opposed to the founding fathers, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights?
You do agree with the 1st Amendment… don’t you?
Indeed, Wikipedia isn’t quite the evil that its right-wing detractors will have it out to be; it’s still better than Conservapedia, for example. It’s just fine for many non-political topics.
But it’s hardly some impartial tool. It’s fairly obvious from where they pull their sources. The Wikipedia’s editors routinely use Daily Beast and Raw Story as reasonable sources for current events…but not Zero Hedge or PJ Media or InfoWars.
Case in point: the text that Timothy cited comes from ProPublica, a news source committed to investigating institutions of a certain political persuasion, while running defense for another. This is entirely ProPublica’s right, but Wikipedia can’t claim to be neutral in its portraying of ADF if it offers material clearly intended to defame ADF without drawing equally from why it has proponents. Case in point: the article has a whole section “Opposition to LGBTQ Rights”. A neutral framing would have said “ADL’s view on traditional nuclear families versus LGBTQ rights”. Not gonna happen with Wikipedia.
ADF is basically a right-wing counterpart to ACLU, though ACLU is much much larger. It should be noted that the Wikipedia article for ACLU offers no similar articles exploring the compensation of their leadership team. Maybe it’s because ACLU is just so committed to its cause that its Executive Team live like ascetics. But we’d never know, would we? No similar journalistic outfit exists to explore the compensation rates, and if we were to learn they were raking in the dough like, say, Black Lives Matter, would mainstream media cover it? ProPublica certainly wouldn’t jump at the opportunity.
I guess whether you agree to transgender pronouns or not, why couldn’t he just call every student by their last name? This would have protected his religious convictions while also not singling students out? Easy fix.
undue burden???? oy…