Court Socks It to School Board

by Lee Duigon

October 2, 2024

Do you have an unquenchable desire to lord it over your fellow citizens? To enslave them and humiliate them? Do you find yourself burning with a lust for authority—any kind of authority—so you can control what other people say and do?

Wouldn’t you just love to be in government?

This is why our country’s founders wrote a Constitution that widely dispersed authority instead of concentrating it. They knew what mischief lurks in human souls.

Recent news from West Point, Virginia, shows how wise they were.

Here, the local school board freedom-eaters fired a teacher for “misgendering” a student. If a boy says he’s a girl—this was the school district’s policy—the teacher must pretend he really is one. If Harry demands you call him Ellie May from now on, that’s what the teacher was required to do.

Well, one teacher refused to go along with that—so of course they fired him. That was a year ago.

The teacher took them to court: I guess he doesn’t like being forced to say things that are patently untrue. The Virginia Supreme Court agreed with him and now the West Point school district has been ordered to pay him $575,000 in damages.

Well and good: our Constitution at work. Executive branch—here, a school board—tramples on a citizen’s rights and is shot down by the judiciary. The board has even agreed to change its policy—no more forcing people to say things they don’t believe. “Compelled speech,” as we call it, is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It gets shot down a lot in courts throughout the land, but our wannabe masters keep trying to make it stick. If the courts ever let up on them, they’d have us all in gulags.

But hey! It’s no skin off their noses. They aren’t going to pay that $575,000. The West Point taxpayers are. It’s no good pointing out that the board members pay property taxes, too. The board members were the ones who did the wrong; the court has said so; shouldn’t they, personally, have to pony up the fine?

You can always blame the voters for electing these tinhorn tyrants in the first place. But if those school board elections were anything like the scores of school board elections I covered as a reporter, chances are the subject never came up during the campaign. The voters only find out afterward that they’ve elected a bunch of left-wing loons who want to push “gender” politics.

The persons who took away the teacher’s livelihood, because he refused to pay lip service to a thing that wasn’t true, should be the ones who have to pay the damages. Personally. Not “Everybody has to pay for what you did.”

School boards would be a lot more careful about embarking on societal experiments if the cost of misgovernment came out of their own pockets.

It would be good if parents simply abandoned “public education” altogether. That’s the ultimate solution to the problem. Failing that, it should at least be a given, everywhere, for school board members to be subject to recall elections whenever they stepped out of line.

Quite simply, and one way or another, this kind of mischief by the school boards has to be stopped.

I have discussed these and other issues throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Click the link and drop in for a visit. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net