An Ohio federal court has found that "misgendering" - refusal to participate in gender ideology - is not protected by the First Amendment and there are no religious exceptions.
The decision was made on the recommendation of Jewish Magistrate Judge Karen Litkovitz, and upheld by Judge Susan J. Dlott in the District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
The complaint was filed in November 2018 by Shawnee State University philosophy professor Nicholas Meriweather. According to Meriweather, he was reprimanded by administrators at his publicly funded school after a man pretending to be a woman joined his class and began demanding to be referred to as "she" and "ms."
Meriweather refused to participate in the ideological exercise, but did not "misgender" the student either. Instead, he attempted to compromise and address the student only by his surname. In response the transgender student began threatening him and calling him names, finally enlisting administrators to punish him.
Meriweather took Shawnee State to court, stating that his religious beliefs forbade him from pretending men are women and that he had a First Amendment right to refuse the new arbitrary transgender cultural imposition. In a landmark ruling, Litkovitz and Dlott dismissed the case, stating that "His speech -- the manner by which he addressed a transgender student -- was not protected by the First Amendment."
The September 2019 recommendation report by Litkovitz asserts that a public employee's willingness to participate in gender ideology is not protected by laws and precedents intended to protect faculty speech, the assumption being that transgenderism is an immutable characteristic apparently granting the movements adepts to special Civil Rights act privileges that supersede individual personal conscience. According to Litkovitz's Orwellian logic, using a person's made up pronouns “cannot reasonably be construed as having conveyed any beliefs or stated any facts about gender identity.”
Litkovitz also found no evidence that religious discrimination played a role in compelling Meriweather to say things he doesn't believe.
more..
https://national-justice.com/federal...otected-speech
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