Suit was filed this week in an Ohio federal district court by a middle school teacher who resigned after refusing on religious grounds to comply with the school's policy regarding transgender students. The school required teachers to address students by their preferred names and pronouns. The complaint (full text) in Geraghty v. Jackson Local School District Board of Education, (ND OH, filed 12/12/20222), alleges in part:
2. The Constitution guarantees a freedom of thought that includes a freedom to differ....
3. The Constitution protects this freedom to differ, in part, by prohibiting the government from adopting and enforcing a set of approved views on these matters in America’s public schools....
4. Defendants have abandoned this guiding light and adopted one particular view on this subject: that a person’s subjective identity determines whether a person is male or female, not a person’s sex. Compounding their unlawful adoption of an orthodoxy in this area, they have created and implemented a Policy requiring teachers, including Plaintiff Vivian Geraghty, to mouth her own support of Defendants’ views by forcing her, as a condition of keeping her job as a public school teacher, to participate in the “social transition” of children in her class.
5. Ms. Geraghty has a different view of this fundamental matter, informed by her scientific understanding and her Christian faith....
7. Because no interest justifies the state’s treatment of Ms. Geraghty—indeed, the very nature of free speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom from state-enforced orthodoxy on fundamental matters condemns the state’s attempt to purge contrary views from its schools—she brings this Complaint for injunctive, declaratory, and compensatory relief.
ADF issued a press release announcing the filing of the lawsuit.
