Vivian Geraghty, a teacher in America, brought the lawsuit against Ohio’s Jackson Local School District in 2022, after she was told to resign from a middle school language arts position over her stance on the matter, writes the New York Post.
The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students,
Logan Spena, a legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization representing Geraghty, told local NBC4 Ohio.
It all began in 2022 after Geraghty said two students requested she use names that align “with their new gender identities rather than their legal names.” Another student had wanted to be called by different pronouns, citing a school policy requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns.
Geraghty held firm, however, refusing to use either the pronouns or the students’ new names, citing her "religious beliefs and constitutional rights". The school subsequently forced her to resign.
"The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost,” Logan Spena highlighted
The agreement reached last month, which will see the teacher receive 450 thousand US dollars in damages, comes after the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled in August that the school’s pronoun policy was "not neutral” and that forcing Geraghty to use preferred pronouns amounted to "compelled speech”.
Family business brought down
The family-run Peruvian Lima restaurant in Concord, California served its final meals on New Year’s Eve after being financial crushed by the weight of a recent lawsuit, Fox News reported.
The restaurant hosted weekly ladies’ nights, when women were offered discounted drinks. Chef and owner John Marquez told the New York Post that a sex discrimination lawsuit filed last year cost the restaurant tens of thousands of dollars.
We haven’t fully recovered from the recent discrimination lawsuit related to our ladies’ night discount,
Marquez told KRON-TV recently, suggesting that the people behind the lawsuit aren’t local residents, but „ambulance-chasing lawyers” looking to cash in on the state’s law.
he told ABC7 News:
It’s a frivolous lawsuit that took us down.
But California law on the books indeed shows that businesses are supposed to provide "full and equal accommodations” regardless of customers’ identities. The Unruh Civil Rights Act, a decades-old California law, states that "All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” This is what profiteering lawyers exploit.
Cover photo: Illustration (Source: Pexels)
