South Carolina AG leads legal battle over gender pronoun rules in school districts

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South Carolina’s attorney general is leading a legal battle over gender pronoun rules in the U.S.’s public school districts. 

AG Alan Wilson appeared on “The Faulkner Focus” on Friday to explain how some gender pronoun rules in school districts threaten free speech. 

The case started with a school district outside Columbus, Ohio, that adopted policies requiring everyone to use a student’s preferred pronouns, which parental rights groups challenged and lost in both the district and appeals courts. Now, Ohio and South Carolina are leading 23 states in a legal battle, claiming the action “reflects the unusually egregious government action here” and, “The First Amendment forbids school officials from coercing students to express messages inconsistent with the student’s values.”

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Wilson, who is co-leading the legal fight, said local school districts across the country, like the one in Ohio, are compelling students “to lie to violate their own personal viewpoints.”

AG Alan Wilson.

“That is something that we cannot abide in Ohio, South Carolina or any state in this country,” he said. “Yes, the lawsuit has gotten struck down, or we have lost at the district court and the court of appeals level, but this is one of those cases that I think is best served by going to the US Supreme Court.” 

Wilson pointed out that in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that teachers and students don’t shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate, but argues that the school district in Ohio is trying to force all students to say things that many might not believe in.

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“Parental rights groups are doing what I think groups around the country are all doing, and it’s trying to protect their children from being compelled to not only violate their First Amendment rights inside the schoolhouse, but this policy, the one in Ohio in particular, would do the same thing outside of school,” he said.  

“If you were at a mall on a Saturday or you were texting a friend or putting something on X or Twitter or whatever, you could be penalized when you showed up at school on Monday morning for using the wrong pronoun that someone found offensive,” he added. 

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