On Tuesday, the House Education Committee passed my bill, HF 2139, which prohibits schools from taking disciplinary actions against employees, contractors, or students for the use of legal names, or the name on their school record, or for the failure to use personal pronouns in official communications. Unfortunately, the Legislature must address bills like this to protect students and teachers from being compelled to say something that doesn’t align with their beliefs.
It has been long upheld that the government cannot compel speech. In Iowa students cannot be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance if the students object to it. Still, a few radicals want to force students and teachers to use pronouns that they may object to. If those individuals refuse to submit, these people want them to be punished and labeled as a bully or worse. Ironically, the real bullying seems to be occurring by individuals trying to compel certain speech on the part of someone else.
What is compelled speech? Compelled speech occurs when the government forces you to “articulate, advocate, promote, communicate, or otherwise express messages or beliefs that you do not want to.” Another way of putting it, it happens when the government (or in this case a school) threatens or punishes you for not speaking.
In Virginia, Peter Vlaiming, a high school teacher, was fired because he refused to use male pronouns for a female student. The facts of the case began in 2018 when he was placed on leave and in December 2023 the Virginia Supreme Court reinstated his case and affirmed that Virginians have a right not to be forced to express messages that violate their beliefs. The case has now been returned to the trial court to be heard.
Another Virginia teacher, Tanner Cross, was suspended from his job after voicing his opinion against a pronoun policy at a school board meeting, He has since been joined by two other educators in this suit. He was reinstated after a ruling in a local court and that decision was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court. The school board agreed to a permanent injunction prohibiting it from retaliating against Tanner Cross for expressing his constitutionally protected views.
At the subcommittee on HF 2139, we heard about a situation here in Iowa. A student didn’t use the correct term when speaking to the teacher unintentionally. The teacher pulled the student aside, made the student write an apology, and then publicly presented that apology to the class.
This bill just protects teachers and students from being bullied into speech they don’t agree with or speech they simply accidentally get wrong. Legislators should not have to legislate this, but it seems common sense is waning in the education sphere.
