(LifeSiteNews) – The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given an Indiana music teacher the green light to proceed with his lawsuit against a school district that forced him out over his refusal to refer to gender-confused students by inaccurate pronouns.
As LifeSiteNews covered in 2023, former Brownsburg High School music teacher John Kluge was pressured into resigning in 2018 after the Brownsburg Community School Corporation (BCSC) rescinded the accommodation it had reached with him to allow him to refer to students exclusively by their last names instead of preferred gender pronouns or opposite-sex first names.
In November 2023, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana seeking summary judgment “that the district violated his rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by failing to accommodate his sincerely held religious beliefs in the absence of undue harm and by retaliating against him for insisting on such accommodation.” The district court denied his request, but Kluge filed again with the 7th Circuit in July 2024.
On August 5, a 7th Circuit panel ruled 2-1 that Brownsburg had failed to show that Kluge’s stand was contrary to a safe and inclusive learning environment, and that a jury could hear his case, the Associated Press reported.
“Brownsburg has not carried its burden to show undisputed facts of a serious disruption to the learning environment” or “increased stigmatization” of transgender students, Circuit Judge Michael Brennan wrote.
“Title VII requires the government to accommodate its employees’ freedom to live and work according to their religious beliefs,” responded ADF attorney David Cortman, who is representing the teacher. “The Brownsburg school district ignored this right, deciding instead that Mr. Kluge’s religious views couldn’t be tolerated. It revoked his religious accommodation based on the complaints of a few, forcing him to resign or be fired. The 7th Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling against Mr. Kluge and sent the case back down for trial. We look forward to proving at trial that Brownsburg discriminated against Mr. Kluge.”
Across the country, teachers and students alike have been subjected to penalties for “misgendering,” i.e., neglecting or refusing to refer to others by opposite-sex pronouns despite the fact that evidence shows “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decision.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife (on top of the life-altering toll of transition procedures themselves such as loss of fertility).
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such developments is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.
