A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 that a Christian teacher in a public school cannot show students any material that contradicts the school’s supremacist LGBTQ plus ideology. This ideology compels forced acceptance of belief, including gender fluidity and transitioning children, which is an existential challenge to American Rule of Law, where no entity, government or private, can compel belief or speech.
The dissenting Judge, Lawrence VanDyke, wrote, “Could public school administrators establish a policy allowing office decoration with partisan political messages deemed sufficiently ‘compassionate’ but prohibit—as inherently ‘hostile’—any political speech that did not align with the Democratic Socialists of America platform?…
If your instinctual answer to each of these questions is ‘No!’… you might be an everyday American. But according to the majority today, you vastly overestimate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech in our nation’s schools. In a decision that is irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent, the majority announces an expansive new rule that all expression by public-school employees that might be observed by students is necessarily government speech, and not the personal speech of an American citizen—even when any reasonable observer would perceive the speech as the employee’s own personal expression.”
Ninth Circuit Upholds Ban on Christian Employee’s Books– www.standingforfreedom.com
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In completely ignoring the Supreme Court’s landmark free speech ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal appellate court insists that staff who express beliefs that don’t align with a school’s established orthodoxy can be fired.
[UPDATE] On Tuesday, a panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Oregon social worker Rod Theis has no free speech right to display books in his public school office that disagree with radical gender ideology — and that his firing was justified.
Theis, a devout Christian, used to work as an education specialist for InterMountain Education Service District, which required him to travel to different district schools to administer standardized tests to students. He was not a teacher and rarely had contact with most students but did have office space in two of the districts’ schools.
Many InterMountain district staff, including teachers, are allowed to decorate their classrooms and offices with various posters, flags, and books that promote Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ messages, pride flags, political candidates, views on political and social topics, and more. While still employed there, Theis followed their lead by displaying three children’s books — Johnny the Walrus, He is He, and She is She — in his offices. The three books teach the biblical view that sex is unchanging and that children should accept themselves as the sex they were born.
Though no student or parent ever complained about the books, one teacher in 2024 researched the books online, determined that they promote a “binary view of gender,” and filed a complaint, claiming that the three books are “transphobic” and therefore offensive. In response, InterMountain officials ordered Theis to remove the books. He filed a lawsuit and received an injunction from a district court that allowed him to display the books when students were not present. Soon thereafter, the same hostile teacher sent several students to Theis’s office, asking to see the books, to which he eventually agreed; the staff member caught Theis on video showing the books to the students, and the school district fired him.
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