Judge Educates Woke Administrators on Free Speech

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Liberal educators were disappointed to learn employees can’t be fired for political incorrectness. There’s this nifty thing Americans have called a “Constitution,” Judge Sean Jordan, lectured. The progressives who run the University of North Texas might want to read it sometime. Starting with the First Amendment.

Judge legalizes microaggression

There’s at least one place in America where the Constitution hasn’t been debunked and used for toilet paper, the United States District Court for Eastern Texas.

The 69-page order Judge Sean Jordan published on March 11 was meant to be a textbook for college administrators on why they can be held legally accountable for their actions if they unlawfully fire an employee “for exercising their right of free speech.

Microaggression may be a hot-button issue for liberal educators responsible for brainwashing the next generation into mindless obedience. It’s also perfectly fine to call that theory “garbage,” Judge Jordan declares.

The battle started over a stack of flyers “pushing the idea of ‘microaggressions‘” in a staff break room at the publicly funded University of North Texas. Math professor Nathaniel Hiers saw them, one day back in 2019. He was offended.

The flyers in question “were not approved by the school for distribution.” They were left there for volunteers to take. Hiers committed the dastardly deed of microaggression himself when he jotted “don’t leave garbage lying around” on the chalkboard next to the stack. Chairman of the Mathematics department, Ralph Schmidt, went spastic and “demanded the ‘coward‘ who wrote the message come forward.

He wasn’t microagressive, he was full on combative. Hiers stepped up to acknowledge he wrote it. He called it “a joke” but flatly refused to apologize. The judge says, no, it may be funny but it’s not a joke. “Hiers had a First Amendment right to speak about the issue openly,” even if it did upset progressives. He got fired and they owe him big time. It “is irrelevant that Hiers made his point with a joke, because humor is a ‘time-tested‘ way to engage in political and social commentary.

Freedom of Speech

According to Judge Jordan, when Professor Hiers picked up the chalk that day, his perfectly free speech “touched on a matter of public concern.” Firing him for it “violated the First Amendment.” End of discussion. Before he was terminated, Schmidt tried to order him into behavior modification. He told his boss where to stick the “supplemental diversity training.” The court approved of that wholeheartedly.

The school openly admitted it had fired the professor for what he said and tried to force him to recant his ideas and adopt the Left’s ideologies.” This, the judge added, “is a violation of the Constitution, one that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on many times.

A few days after the meeting, Hiers got the news in the mail that his teaching contract had been “rescinded.” The school tried to claim that Hiers could “be perceived as threatening” others with his extremist, right-wing orthodoxy. Judge Jordan points out that Hiers was commenting on “a hot button issue related to the ongoing struggle over the social control of language in our nation and, particularly, in higher education.

His protected speech “reflected his protest of a topic (microaggressions) born from the present-day political correctness movement that has become an issue of contentious cultural debate.

Compelled speech is deeply suspect in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence” because it “diminishes autonomy, stymies the search for truth, and extinguishes the debates necessary for the continuous improvement of our Republic,” Judge Jordan wrote.

As ADF Legal Counsel Michael Ross notes, “the freedom to express one’s viewpoint is a bedrock principle we hold dear in America. As a result, the First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to punish people because it disagrees with their opinions.