Yet
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out a suit from teachers claiming their 1st and 14th Amendment rights were violated when the administration, supported by the school board, told them they had to take their gay flags down.
Mark me surprised by the background details. First, some kids felt uncomfortable in the presence of the flags and actually reported that. Second, Administration told the teacher they had to remove the flags (school policy). Third, the teacher objected but actually did it.
Christopher Dolce, Sarah Ecke, and Shinaide McAleavey Polley are teachers at Connetquot Central High School and “open members of the LGBTQ+ community.” App’x 24. In 2022, Connetquot Central School District officials ordered Ecke to take down two pride flags that hung on the walls of her math classroom. They also told Dolce and McAleavey-Polley that they could not place pride flag stickers on their classroom doors. In response, Ecke, Dolce, and McAleavey Polley sued the District, the Board of Education, and various District officials under Section 1983, Title VII, Title IX, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the Suffolk County Human Rights Law.
Apparently, being queer gives you the right to hang pride flags and affix pride stickers to things ‘cuz reasons. The class was not about sexuality, politics, or even culture. It was a math class, which is one of several reasons why their lawsuit didn’t add up.
Ecke, Dolce, and McAleavey-Polley sued the District, the Board of Education, and the aforementioned District officials under Section 1983, Title VII, Title IX, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the Suffolk County Human Rights Law. As relevant here, they alleged that the District and its officials violated their free speech rights, denied them equal protection of the laws, and discriminated against them because of their sex and sexual orientation.
The Circuit Court very politely told them to f-off. First, Public school teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But when teachers, like other “public employees,” “make statements pursuant to their official duties,” they “are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes [.] ”They are providing hired speech for the Government. And when speech “owes its existence to a public employee’s professional responsibilities,” the Government gets to control the content of that speech—or restrict it altogether.
While academic and classroom instruction can invoke Am 1 protection, the classroom walls are not a palette for speech that has nothing to do with instruction. In other words, math isn’t gay enough.
I should also add that a teacher advertising their sexual preferences on their classroom walls does not a safe space, make. Quite the opposite. If heterosexual teachers advertised their sexuality in the classroom, they’d be investigated and run out on a cisgender rail. There should be zero tolerance for any display related to sexuality outside of academic and classroom instruction in a health class, and politicizing it, does not an excuse, make.
It is grooming regardless of where you stand on whatever spectrum you imagine exists.
The queer teachers claimed their rights were violated, but the court could not find a reason to agree.
The court offers plenty of details about the alleged infringements and why the court rejected them, and as decisions go, it is not a long read. It might be worth your time. We run into a lot of this sort of thing, as do our readers and contributors.
The groomers are relentless and label themselves victims of things everyone else assumes are just proper form. You don’t get special rights because of whom you are sexually attracted to, and the practice of insisting that such advertisement is a protected right needs to go away with the flags, stickers, gear, and other crap.
This is a public school. You are not paid to proselytize your sexual preferences or anyone else’s. Your job is to teach the fundamentals of literacy or numeracy, some critical thinking, and maybe some civics and a bit of unvarnished history.
It’s the same as where everyone else works. They don’t get to do and say whatever they want on the company dime.
Outside the classroom environment or the school grounds, knock yourself out if that’s a priority to you, but you chose to be a government employee. You chose that. That’s who you are, so live with it or quit.
