[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Mid Vermont Christian School is a private, religious Pre-K through 12th grade school. The school has a good reputation for its academics and athletics programs while also holding true to its religious beliefs in everything that it does. Students and families who choose the school know, and in many cases share, the school’s religious beliefs.
Competing against a biological boy who identifies as a girl in a girls’ sports competition would make Mid Vermont Christian School complicit, the school contends, in furthering the transgender sexual mutability ideology in violation of the school’s religious beliefs. For that reason, as well as safety concerns, the religious school refused to compete in a high school basketball game against a girls’ team from Long Trail School that included a biological boy identifying as a girl. Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited the game instead and was out of the playoff tournament.
Vermont’s progressive education authorities did not take long to punish Mid Vermont Christian School for standing up for its faith-based values. They claimed that the school’s action violated the Vermont Public Accommodations Act and Fair Employment Practices Act, which prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Vermont authorities refused Mid Vermont Christian School’s request for a religious exemption and brushed aside its well-founded safety concerns.
The executive council of the Vermont Principals’ Association exercised its oversight authority over school sports in ruling that Mid Vermont Christian School could not compete in any future athletic competitions because it was discriminating against transgender students. The Vermont State Board of Education imposed an even harsher punishment that blocked publicly funded tuition assistance to students at the Christian school.
Under Vermont’s Town Tuitioning Program, school districts that do not operate public high schools must use public funds to pay for students residing in the district to attend “approved” private independent schools or public schools in other districts. The Board of Education excluded Mid Vermont Christian School from participating in this tuition assistance program because it would not adhere to the state’s transgenderism ideology in all aspects of its operations.
The punitive actions taken by the Vermont Principals’ Association and Vermont State Board of Education against the Christian school and its students are grossly disproportionate to the alleged violation of Vermont’s anti-discrimination laws protecting transgender females and males. The school forfeited the playoff game and lost its chance to continue to participate in the tournament. Perhaps a brief suspension of the girls’ high school team from playing in a few games at the start of the next basketball season could have been added. But the progressive secularists in charge of Vermont’s educational system decided instead to exclude Mid Vermont Christian School and its students from all state-sponsored middle school and high school athletic programs and from the state’s tuition assistance program. The only way that the school could have avoided such a draconian punishment would have been to forfeit its right to freely exercise its religious beliefs.
Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Mid Vermont Christian School and two families in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in November 2023 against Vermont officials for punishing the Christian school and its students because of their religious beliefs.
The school’s court complaint lays out its central grievance:
“Simply put, the State believes sex is mutable and biological differences do not matter.”
“The State is entitled to its own views, but it is not entitled, nor is it constitutional, to force private, religious schools across the state to follow that orthodoxy as a condition to participating in Vermont’s tuitioning program and the State’s athletic association.”
“But that is exactly what the State has done…The State requires religious schools like Mid Vermont Christian School…to follow (and affirm compliance with) laws, rules, and policies that prevent those schools from operating consistently with their religious beliefs about sexuality and gender.”
Mid Vermont Christian School also expressed concerns about the safety of its biological girl athletes who could have been gravely injured if forced to compete on an uneven playing field against a team that includes a biological boy.
Basketball is a physically demanding game. Biological males have physiological advantages over biological females in terms of body height, jump height, muscular strength, and endurance. That a biological boy player identifies as a girl does not change that scientific fact.
Mid Vermont Christian School’s complaint noted that the “biological male on Long Trail’s team is taller than any girl on Mid Vermont Christian’s team. Available video of the biological male playing basketball, which showed the athlete repeatedly blocking girls’ shots, throwing elbows, and knocking girls down further underscored Mid Vermont Christian’s concerns.”
The complaint also pointed to a high school girl in North Carolina who “suffered severe head and neck injuries resulting in long-term concussion symptoms after a biological male on the other team spiked a volleyball in her face. This story was widely reported in the media and known to Mid Vermont Christian.”
Mid Vermont Christian School chose not to risk the physical safety of its biological girl players by requiring them to play against a team that included a tall, aggressive biological boy who identified as a girl. The school was acting responsibly, backed by clear scientific evidence of the physiological differences between biological girls and biological boys that work to the advantage of biological boys competing in an athletic contest against biological girls.
That being said, the crux of Mid Vermont Christian School’s civil rights action against Vermont’s education officials is that these officials unconstitutionally discriminated against the Christian school for exercising its deeply held religious beliefs.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, Carson v. Makin, which made it clear that the government could not exclude otherwise eligible private schools from participating in a publicly funded tuition assistance program “because of their religious exercise.” In Carson, the Supreme Court held that Maine’s discriminatory tuition assistance program, which was substantially the same as Vermont’s tuitioning program, “violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”
The State of Vermont is now attempting an end run around this Supreme Court decision. It is withholding publicly funded tuition assistance from a private religious school and blackballing the school from athletic competitions because the school has stood fast in exercising its religious belief that sex is immutable rather than surrendering to transgenderism.
Mid Vermont Christian School’s case is still pending in a lower federal court. The school should take its case all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to vindicate its constitutional rights and beat back this latest progressive secularist attack on religious liberties.