An Idaho teenager has lost a job with the U.S. Forest Service for telling classmates at his high school that there are only two genders. Earlier, he was barred by his school from walking at graduation for saying this.
This is a violation of the First Amendment, which generally forbids public employers to make hiring decisions based on people’s speech about matters of public concern. (See Pickering v. Board of Education (1968)).
Discussion of gender roles is protected by the First Amendment as a matter of public concern, even when the discussion is very mundane. See Dishnow v. Village of Rib Lake, 77 F.3d 194, 197 (7th Cir. 1996) (First Amendment covered guidance counselor’s remarks about such “topics as the sharing of household tasks by a working couple”).
Travis Lohr recently graduated from Kellogg High School. At a school assembly, he told his fellow students: “boys are boys and girls are girls. There is no in between.”
“I wasn’t able to walk at graduation. My offer to work for the forest service was rescinded,” Lohr told Fox and Friends. He was scheduled to begin his job “fighting wildland forest fires” on Sunday, but when he showed up to complete his employment paperwork, he was told by his supervisor that the job offer had been revoked.
The Idaho Tribune reports that the supervisor who revoked the job offer is John Heyn. Heyn leads the North Idaho Type III Incident Management Team, part of the Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District of the U.S. Forestry Service. Heyn is married to Natalie Heyn, a teacher at Kellogg High School.
The controversy began on June 1. As part of graduation-related activities, seniors were invited to give advice to the underclassmen. Lohr had pre-approved remarks, but added to them in comments that drew loud applause. “There was a short pause, and then an uproar of cheers,” he told the Tribune.
School administrators then banned Lohr from walking at graduation. In response, over 100 students, parents, and residents protested outside Kellogg High School. That included a school bus driver who was fired by the school system for doing so.
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA observed that Lohr’s treatment is an example of an extreme double standard based on ideology: “If Travis Lohr promoted BLM at a school assembly, or endorsed child mutilations, or called Trump Hitler, nothing would have happened to him. But instead he said that ‘boys are boys,’ so he’s been barred from participating in his high school graduation — in Idaho!”
Kirk is quite right. As The Daily Wire reports, progressive students can get away with saying infinitely more offensive and disruptive things, without any discipline or adverse consequences:
One of the nation’s most prestigious law schools admitted a transgender student who in his application dismissed his diagnoses of mental disorders as coming from a “white bitch” psychiatrist in “Amerikkka,” then later cursed out a feminist law professor as transphobic and sent bizarre emails to the entire student body….Northwestern School of Law capitulated to the student, Ishani Chokshi, and even gave him his own law journal, which published his screeds likening judges’ gavels to “dildos.” And last month, a year after Chokshi graduated, a prestigious law journal published a “legal paper” by him that details his purported sexual escapades with seven men. On May 3, Northwestern Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology published “Of Law and Men,” attributed to “badgaltranny,” an alias of Chokshi, in which he wrote, “I, an Indian-American transgender woman, share stories of my sexual escapades with seven Trump supporters.”… He routinely spammed a listserv that included every member of the student body with sentiments such as “it is not the judge’s tongue but his c–k which reins [sic].” The emails, reviewed by The Daily Wire, also included mundane musings such as “I am emailing because today is my birthday… I am asking for donations of $5,000 and $10,000.”
While Lohr is being canceled from employment because his statement is viewed as being at odds with gender ideology, colleges and institutions across the country are imposing DEI (diversity/equity/inclusion) requirements on job applicants. Some colleges are requiring applicants to tout their experience promoting DEI, while others are requiring applicants to sign DEI statements affirming their belief in specified things.
The California Community Colleges have proposed speech-chilling DEI regulations that would enable them to get rid of conservative faculty, by penalizing faculty for not having a woke ideology. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, “Faculty members would, for instance, have to acknowledge the correctness of certain beliefs (e.g., the role of racial and cultural identities in ‘creating structures of oppression and marginalization,’ and the harm caused by one’s ‘internal biases’) and actively promote CCC’s ideological conception of DEIA in their teaching, research and service activities, such as by ‘[d]evelop[ing] and implement[ing] a pedagogy and/or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens.’
“Diversity” and “inclusion” are not excuses for violating First Amendment rights. California courts have ruled that government employees usually cannot be punished for disagreeing with their employer’s affirmative-action or “diversity” policy. (See, e.g., Cal. Dept. of Corrections v. State Personnel Bd. (1997)).
Similarly, a federal appeals court ruled that an assistant fire chief in charge of personnel could express opinions at odds with city policy on affirmative action to a minority group, without being fired. (See Meyers v. City of Cincinnati (1991)).
Nor does the Constitution enshrine goals like “diversity” as a job requirement. The Constitution requires only the absence of discrimination in our schools, not “diversity,” affirmative action, or other things that might be seen as promoting “equity.” (See Schuette v. BAMN (2014)).
