Compelled speech is unconstitutional but so what? When you’re dark god says punish the unbelievers, you charge three middle-school boys with sexual harassment for using the wrong pronoun.
Rosemary Rabidoux told Fox News Digital she received a phone call from the school’s principal saying she would be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against her son, Braden.
“I immediately thought, ‘sexual harassment, that’s rape, that’s incest, that’s inappropriate touching, even grotesque language could go that far.’ And when I asked him what my son did, he said that he did not use the correct pronouns,” she said.
I think the first words out of my mouth would be, okay – I’m suing the ever-living crap out of you. I hope you’re ready. Sue them for what? This is bullying, it’s compelled speech, and the first best thing to do is to take a rhetorical blowtorch to everyone involved.
The Rabidoux’s are being a bit more conservative. They’ve got “Luke Berg, deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty,” going to bat for them.
“Sexual harassment covers really egregious stuff, not simply using the so-called wrong pronoun. The school’s theory seems to be that any use of a wrong pronoun is automatically punishable speech under Title IX, and if that is truly their position, that is a truly egregious First Amendment violation.”
He’s probably going to win, but getting the district to drop the charges and correct the record isn’t enough. As we’ve seen with policy JBAB here in New Hampshire, significant, long-term litigation, or the threat of litigation, on multiple fronts against individuals, boards, and districts is needed.
Not everyone will have the finances or the stomach, so they ignore you and hope you’ll go away. But you have to be relentless. Use every avenue available within the law, from right-to-know requests to – and this is often easier than you think – hanging them out to dry using their bylaws or meeting rules.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty needs to do more than win the case. They need to plow into the foundation that brought it on in the first place.
As I understand it, Title IX prohibits the government entity doing business as a school district from discrimination. Title IX does not grant Gestapo-like police powers in the name of anti-bullying that are themselves bullying.
Such an interpretation would permit schools to stifle any protected expression in the classroom at will.
The last time I checked, the pro-CRT people were all about protecting speech. They insist that removing any curriculum that paints white kids as systemic racists is anti-free speech. It’s not, but they said it
If labeling white kids as unrepentant racists is protected speech, what chance do pronouns have?
Thankfully, the left has double standards (or they’d have none at all). They can have their cake and eat it too. But to the average American, that’s not fair.
Policy JBAB collapsed because no authorizing authority was ever given (by the legislature) to the schools to impose such a thing as preferred pronouns nor the ability to enforce compliance. But it has been seven years since the policy first appeared, and only last week the school board association was forced to retract it.
Whatever is going on in Wisconsin, it won’t be that easy, but it needs to start now, or it’ll get away from them, and free speech must be protected no matter the cost.
