A Christian middle school teacher from Ohio will receive a sizable payout from her government school employer after administrators tried compelling her to call two self-described transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns.
Jackson Local School District settled with the teacher, Vivian Geraghty, Dec. 18 for $450,000 in damages and attorney fees following a lawsuit in which she argued that her First Amendment rights were violated, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented her.
She had been forced to resign from her position as English teacher for refusing to comply with a demand to enable the “social transition” of two students who did not want to be called by their names and pronouns as listed on the school roster.
Geraghty could not fulfill that request because it violated her Christian convictions.
WCMH-TV reported that the two students approached Geraghty on the first day of school in August 2022, asking her to refer to them “using names different from their names on the school’s roster.”
Geraghty refused, and “continued to refer to the students using their deadnames, the name a trans person was assigned at birth but that does not align with their gender identity,” WCMH reported.
“That student then reached out to a school counselor, writing that ‘one of my teachers dead-naming me all the time in class.’
After several meetings with school administrators, Geraghty continued refusing to refer to the students by their “new” pronouns.
“If that is your final decision, then we need a letter of resignation effective today,” the teacher said said she was told.
“The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat 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,” Logan Spena, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement.
“The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost,” Spena added.
The legal nonprofit added that Geraghty’s religious beliefs and understanding of science “govern her view that a person is male or female based on sex, not personal identity, and participating in a student’s social transition violates those beliefs by forcing her to communicate messages she believes are untrue and harmful to the student.
“She has received just vindication for taking this stand.”
Geraghty is not the only Christian teacher to be punished over her refusal to comply with transgender policies.
But thankfully, she is also not the first to win a lawsuit over such a situation.
Attorneys for the Alliance Defending Freedom also won a $575,000 settlement for Peter Vlaming, a teacher in Virginia who faced a similar crackdown.
They likewise won religious accommodations for teachers Deborah Figliola, Kristine Marsh, and Laura Nelson in their battle with Harrisonburg, Virginia, City Public Schools for a similar case.
The legal victory of Geraghty, not to mention these other teachers, shows that doing what is right always pays off in the end, maybe in a very literal sense.
These students, who are often confused and on a search for their own identity, wanted to convince others to lie about them amid that search, and most adults went along with the charade.
But their Christian teachers loved them and feared God too much to lie about them in this way.
In fact, these Christian teachers may have been the only ones who truly loved them, and the lies from the other adults actually reflected a degree of hatred for them.
Even in situations where favorable results are not immediately obtained, doing what is right before God and man is always worthwhile, and it encourages others to do the same.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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