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Will Teachers Be Able To Discriminate Against Their Students After Groff v. Dejoy?

Next, there will be a case fighting for the right to dock the grades of the children of Ham.

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old man inventor scientist professor elderly innovatorThe new meta in bigotry is actually a really old right-wing strategy — whenever you discriminate, just say God made you do it. Get called racist for opposing interracial marriage? I’m not racist, I’m a Christian! Stunting your child’s discovery of how the world works by throwing a fit whenever evolution, ecology or any of the other hard sciences imply the world is more than 3,000 years old? I’m not anti-education, I’m a Christian! This winning strategy has made it to the Supreme Court — the justices decided that a woman denying her services to gay couples who want to get married isn’t discrimination against a protected class, she’s just a Christian! This up-and-coming permission to discriminate “religious rights” case will be a weather vane for what role the Supreme Court’s string of deferral toward religious liberty means for civil rights protections. From Bloomberg Law:

A revived legal dispute over a Christian music teacher’s refusal to use students’ preferred names and pronouns will offer an early test of the US Supreme Court’s new standard for religious accommodations in the workplace.

John Kluge sued Brownsburg Community School Corp. after it rescinded a faith-based accommodation that allowed him to refer to all students exclusively by their last names. He lost his discrimination case under decades-old high court precedent that gave employers more leeway in denying religious requests that pose a minimal hardship on operations.

But the justices in June revamped how courts should analyze religious accommodations, making them more difficult for employers to reject. Now Kluge’s case is heading back to an Indiana federal court, which will reassess his claims under the Supreme Court’s unanimous Groff v. Dejoy decision.

Religious rationale aside, I don’t think that there is a facial issue with referring to all students by their last names. A quirk, sure, but it shouldn’t be a problem as long as each student is being treated fairly. The issue here is what effects will snowball from this growing line of cases that leverage religious beliefs over the hard-fought civil rights victories that citizens, both religious and not, have fought for over time.

Kluge may be suing for the right to refer to students by their last name, but the next litigant could use the precedent set by the new religious accommodations rulings to argue that deadnaming or pushing conversion therapy on kids as a naturally flowing consequence of his religious conviction. Because you can trust that there are schools like that out there that cannot wait to get a chance to discriminate against children:

We need to do our part to prevent hostile learning environments for kids, regardless of who the teacher(s) pray too.

Religious Objections Over Pronouns Test High Court’s New Stance [Bloomberg Law]

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Earlier: TX Judge Cites 303 Creative As General License To Discriminate Against Gays … For Jesus

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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