Teacher’s Student Pronoun Case Puts Dogma Before Compassion

A former music and orchestra teacher’s case against his local school system will go through more litigation following a recent US Supreme Court ruling on religious accommodation in the workplace.

John Kluge, who lost his Title VII suit against Brownsburg Community School Corp., will soon get another chance to make his argument under a more generous standard, thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision in Groff v. Dejoy.

That decision ratcheted up the standard employers must meet under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to justify denying an employee a special religious exemption to a generally applicable workplace policy.

There are some purely legal issues to discuss about what may happen next. But first, there are the more human questions of character and community.

Kluge’s argument centers on his insistence that he can’t use transgender students’ preferred names because his religious beliefs forbid him to “affirm as true ideas and concepts that he deems untrue and sinful” and not “promote” trans identity.

But how does it affirm or promote a belief system to address a person respectfully with the proper name they use? We’re not talking about a student engaging in obnoxious misbehavior, much less someone targeting or mocking a teacher for his faith. These are ordinary students, backed by their parents and care providers, who are simply saying things like, “My name is Sam; please call me that and, if it comes up, please use ‘he’ or ‘him’ to refer to me.”

Religious liberty is a vital element of any pluralistic society where many belief systems, traditions, and practices coexist and thrive. Coexistence demands a measure of humility—a recognition that time may reveal one’s beliefs to be misguided, and that sharing community with people who embrace different traditions can offer unexpected insight.

Humility, in turn, calls us to exhibit compassion: a commitment not to do needless harm as we navigate the workplace, the marketplace, and public institutions alongside people who walk with us even as they follow different paths.

Where does grace reside in Kluge’s request for a religious exemption? What role do compassion and humility play in this orchestra classroom in Indiana, where students just embarking on young adulthood open themselves to the vulnerability and possible inspiration that music performance offers? What values and approach to community does Kluge display when he refuses to address these students respectfully in the way they want to be named and described?

These questions may sound unexpected in a conversation about a legal dispute. Judges ordinarily don’t interrogate the content of the beliefs people profess when making constitutional or statutory claims for special religious exemptions. Courts have concluded that legal disputes shouldn’t turn on a judge’s assessment of a person’s interpretation of their own faith beliefs or the values those beliefs embody.

Indeed, the Supreme Court recently held that a tribunal commits a fatal constitutional error if its members even suggest disapproval of a litigant’s faith-based beliefs during an official proceeding. Perhaps in part for that reason, public discussions of lawsuits involving religious exemptions also seem to shy away from asking such probing questions.

But that’s a mistake—ordinary people aren’t courts. We can and should interrogate the values and the approach to community that people exhibit when they ask to have their personal religious beliefs elevated into special legal privileges at the expense of others in public institutions.

When I read the record and opinions in Kluge v. Brownsburg Cmty. Sch. Corp., the lawyer in me sees a summary judgment record being measured against a statutory standard. But the human in me sees a man who appears to have forgotten humility and compassion in his demand to have his faith accommodated by imposing his dogma on vulnerable teenagers.

If your faith defines respectful acknowledgment of people with different beliefs as forbidden affirmation and promotion, then it operates at variance with a commitment to pluralistic democracy. That’s a serious problem in a public institution.

Will Kluge prevail in his lawsuit on remand before the federal trial court? I doubt it. The record in the district court provides ample basis for finding that transgender students singled out for disrespectful treatment in his class—whether they were misgendered or referred to only by their last names—experienced real harm.

It shouldn’t require a trial for a court to conclude that the school, as an institution, would incur substantial burdens if it were required to permit that harm to students.

Whatever the outcome on the legal questions, however, this case reminds us that ordinary people can and should talk about values in response to requests for special religious exemptions, even if judges can’t.

The case is: Kluge v. Brownsburg Cmty. Sch. Corp., 7th Cir., No. 21-2475, decision 4/7/23

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

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Tobias Barrington Wolff is the Jefferson Barnes Fordham Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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