Attorney General Alan Wilson defends religious liberty in the classroom at SCOTUS

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) –Attorney General Alan Wilson announced today that he has joined a 12-state coalition in a friend-of-the-court brief at the United States Supreme Court supporting religious liberty for teachers.

The case deals with a Maryland school district policy that requires teachers to use the “preferred pronouns” of students while also preventing them from discussing students’ gender identity with their parents.

“Schools across our country are supposed to be places of learning and collaboration,” Attorney General Wilson stated. “Silencing teachers in an attempt to indoctrinate students with woke ideologies is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

In this brief, the attorneys general argue that the Montgomery County Public Schools’s guidelines run afoul of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by pressuring teachers to abandon their religious views. The brief also argues that the guidelines violate the Free Speech clause by silencing speech, compelling speech, and picking a favored viewpoint in the gender identity debate.

“A teacher who believes in the basic biological fact that we are born either male or female and that parents have the right to direct their child’s upbringing should not abandon these deeply held beliefs just to continue teaching their students,” Attorney General Wilson said.

Attorney General Wilson joined the West Virginia-led brief along with the states of Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas.

You can read the brief here.