Sometimes I have to discuss the amendments to the US constitution and remind people that those rights discussed are not "given" by the document. Instead those amendments are explicit restraints on the government, at every level, on infringing on those rights. So in the case of the first amendment, it doesn't *give* you the right to free speech, it protects that right from the government. Further it must be understood that the freedom of speech includes not only the restraint on the government to compel speech (also codified in the 5th amendment) but also prohibits the government from what is called "prior-restraint" of speech.
Webster's dictionary currently defines prior restraint as follows:
governmental prohibition imposed on expression before the expression actually takes place
Of late with the tranny nonsense, many state agencies have attempted to impose both compelled speech as well as prior restraint upon those in its employment. Recently a court punished a university for it.
Shawnee State University in Ohio has reached a settlement with a professor whom it punished for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns, according to a new report.The university will pay philosophy professor Nick Meriwether $400,000 in damages and attorney fees and will rescind a written warning it issued to Meriwether in June 2018 in response to a biological male student’s complaint that the professor refused to use female pronouns for the student, Fox News reported.
Hint, If your university has the word "state" in it, you should know better than compelled speech.
The controversy began in January 18 when Meriwether responded to the student’s question during a political philosophy class by saying, “Yes, sir.” After class, the student told the professor that the student is transgender and asked to be referred to as a woman going forward, including with “feminine titles and pronouns,” according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Meriwether in court.
The professor argued that obliging the student’s requests would violate his own convictions as a Christian. When the professor declined to use female pronouns, the student became belligerent and told Meriwether he would be fired, according to court documents cited by Fox News.
Now my problem here is the religious assertion. I have discussed elsewhere that non-theistic ideologies are equally protected by the first amendment. But worse here is that here you had a state agency attempting to punish a citizen for stating actual facts and refusing to engage in the delusions of another person.
The student then filed a complaint with Shawnee State, which opened an investigation into the incident. The university found that the professor “effectively created a hostile environment” for the student by not using the preferred pronouns. Meriwether offered to call the student by any name requested, however. The student did not accept the professor’s offer, according to the report.Here's the thing though. It was the student who created the hostile environment. Up until he started demanding to put words into the professor's mouth there was no "hostilities". It was the demand to force the professor to say something [that was completely untrue] that was an act of hostility.
This is how they do. They put the world upside down and then try to say that YOU have a problem for noticing that things are wrong.
“Dr. Meriwether rightly defended his freedom to speak and stay silent, and not conform to the university’s demand for uniformity of thought. We commend the university for ultimately agreeing to do the right thing, in keeping with its reason for existence as a marketplace of ideas.”
Personally, I think $400k is too little. A couple hundred million will get the word out quickly to all state colleges and other government agencies that they cannot engage in either prior restraint or compelled speech.
