In the halcyon days of 2021, the Exter School District made all sorts of news. In June, we broke a story that went national about how the High School managed unvaccinated prom attendees. And why not? The Exeter Regional School District already had a long line of embarrassing reports exposing its woke, anti-liberty tendencies (and lawsuits to go with them). A practice that, a few months later, landed them in court again after punishing a student for having a conversation about trans rights.
In November 2021, Skip interviewed Ian Hyuett, the Chief Legal Council member representing the students and their parents (video at the link). “In this case, the Vice-Principal and Football Coach decided that a freshman player was to get a week’s long “athletic suspension” simply for having a discussion with a pro-transgender student (not transgender themselves, mind you) and stating that because of his religious beliefs (he is a strong Catholic) he only believes that there are but male and female sexes/genders.”
….
Cornerstone, which is defending the student, issued an updatetis week indicating what we all likely knew. Exeter lied a little bit, here and there, about details critical to the case.
In his order, Superior Court judge Andrew Schulman issued a point-by-point takedown of Exeter High School officials, who he found penalized M. P. for his opinion that there are “only two genders.” Judge Schulman ruled that the school’s denials were “dishonest” and had “all the believability of Captain Renault’s famous exclamation of shock in Casablanca.” The court determined that it “credits the plaintiff’s [M. P.’s] testimony.”
Examining written records and the statements of the witnesses, the court found that “Despite his in-court protestations to the contrary” M. P.’s football coach punished M. P. because of his “statements regarding gender identity.”
After saying there were “only two genders,” plaintiff M. P. was called into a meeting with Coach William Ball and Vice Principal Marcy Dovholuk, where he was berated for not “respecting people’s identities” before being suspended from football for one week.
Good news and bad, and then, perhaps – good! The court still found for the School, but?
Although the defendants denied that M. P.’s suspension was about gender identity, the court wrote that “the vice principal’s contemporaneous oral statements and contemporaneous log notes prove that the meeting was about pronouns and gender identity.”
Despite these findings, the court eventually ruled in favor of the high school on purely legal grounds, finding that Article 22—New Hampshire’s Free Speech Clause—affords fewer remedies than are available under the federal First Amendment. However, this ruling has set up M. P. with a promising basis for appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Shannon McGinley, Cornerstone’s Executive Director, stated that “Cornerstone and its attorneys look forward to appealing this decision to the New Hampshire Supreme Court—which will be bound by the trial court’s findings of fact—and to securing a ruling that will protect free speech and religious liberty for all Granite State students.”
We want to thank Cornerstone and its supporters for making this challenge possible. While students don’t typically benefit from the full range of free speech protections, this case, in particular, is corrosive in its deceit and deliberate intent to compel speech. The proglodytes won’t like the comparison, but it is apt: Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all compelled speech, leading to an ideological intolerance that led to false imprisonment and mass murder.
Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone.
