Christian teacher awarded $650k after refusing to use ‘preferred pronouns’

[AnotherDayAnotherNameDay]

A Christian teacher in the US has been awarded $650,000 after he was forced to resign for refusing to use the ‘preferred names and pronouns’ of gender-confused pupils.

John Kluge had worked as a music teacher at Brownsburg High School, Indiana, for four years when its corporation introduced a policy requiring gender-confused pupils to receive “affirmation of their preferred identity” and warning teachers they could be disciplined for using “the wrong name/pronoun”. Kluge was initially allowed to refer to all pupils by their surnames, but this was later reversed and he resigned in 2018.

“We hope this settlement shows teachers that they do not have to bow the knee to ideological mandates that violate their religious beliefs. And schools should learn that refusing to accommodate religious employees can be illegal and expensive.”

https://www.christian.org.uk/news/christian-teacher-awarded-650k-after-refusing-to-use-preferred-pronouns/

I wonder if they gave Enoch Burke $650,000 would he just go away?
Probably not, being a martyr is probably more valuable than anything to him🙄

I suppose a wins a win but I can't say I'm turning cartwheels about this one, it's seems like swapping one intolerant cult for another.

So what happens if you’re an atheist and don’t want to use preferred pronouns because you’re a gender atheist too, not because of any religious beliefs?

@NotBadConsideringexactly - esp if he’d been a woman? Cos of course we can’t decide for ourselves 😞

I avoid using any pronouns at all, just like this teacher is reported to have done.

However, as an atheist, I don't have Christianity to protect me.

Thankfully, in the UK we have protection of belief in reality the immutability of biological sex following the Forstater judgment. It's comes with the understandable limitations not to harass someone, which I assume means you can't randomly keep telling a trans person what their sex is when there isn't a need to do so. I can't imagine for a minute that not using any pronouns could constitute harassment. AFAIK nobody has ever been found guilty for something they didn't say in the UK.

But for me, by far the more important protection from the Forstater judgment is the legally protected right to not believe in gender identity. This doesn't require any alternative belief, even a belief in sex immutability. It's simply the right to not believe in it. Screenshot below.

Otherwise we're into the realms of 'belief wars', where the only way to be impartial would be to sit in the middle, acknowledging that the sex immutability believers and gender identity believers are on an equal footing in terms of which is 'true' - similar to Christianity versus Islam (over whether God or Allah is the one true god).

This ties into the Nolan Principles on objectivity. It's impossible to be objective if you're forced to pick between something to believe in. The absence of belief is the objective position. This is important for safeguarding e.g. in schools, where they need to objectively know who the boys and girls are (and who the male and female staff are) so that they can a) maintain single-sex spaces and single-sex contact sports and b) protect vulnerable children from being radicalised into believing that their distress about their changing body and emotions during puberty means that they are trapped in the wrong-sexed body.

I don't know the case well enough but did he try to meet the new ruling halfway like this US man did, by using surnames etc? I suspect not.

Well done to that teacher for going to court. The more fines and insurance payouts there are the sooner this stupidity stops. Money always talks and it's starting to say hell no.

Well done to this bloke but it does annoy me somewhat that you can get off the hook for not affirming other oeoples delusions if you follow an ideology of your own.

What about Atheists for example? Could we get away with this even though we have no ideology to combat it with?