Mid Vermont Christian School Girls Basketball Team

In March, 2023, Mid Vermont Christian School girl’s basketball team decided to end its season by voluntarily forfeiting a postseason game because the opponant they were facing had a transgender girl (a biological boy who says he’s a girl) on their team. The coach and players of Mid Vermont Christian School felt it was unsafe and unfair for their girls to play against a boy. It was not an easy decision, but the safety of the girls, the fairness of the game, and their Christian faith that says boys cannot become girls, or vice verse, was more important to them than the game. They knew that forfeiting the game would end their season, and they were prepared for that.

What they were not prepared for was the punishment the Vermont Principals’ Association imposed on Mid Vermont Christian School, which was to ban not only the girl’s basketball program, but every sports program at the school, from league play. The school was also banned from academic competitions. The ban was for two years. Basically, Vermont was telling Mid Vermont Christian School, either accept our principles and values related to gender ideology, or you will be ostracized from ever athlete and academic competition. Accept boys playing against girls, accept boys in girls locker rooms, showers, bathrooms, etc. or forget about participating in any athlete or academic program for two years. Of course, both the state and the Christian school were likely to emerge from that two year ban without effectively changing their positions, so another ban was likely to follow soon after the first ban was lifted.

Mid Vermont Christian School had no other recourse but to sue the Vermont Principals’ Association. They turned to Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group that represents organizations in just these kinds of disputes, where the secular state attempts to limit the religious practice of Christian and other faith-based organizations. ADF took the case, and senior counsel Dave Cortman said, “Their message was, ‘in order for you to follow your religious beliefs, boys are boys, girls are girls, that would actually violate their nondiscrimination policies.’ So the irony of it was, they were discriminating against religious schools.” The state of Vermont chose to discriminate against religious schools in order to prevent religious schools from violating their nondiscrimination policy! I would remind readers that no where in the US Constitution does the federal government protect a person’s gender identity, but freedom to exercise one’s religion without government interference is the first right listed in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Yet, Vermont was willing to impose its will on the right of a Christian school to be Christian and effectively punish all 111 students at Mid Vermont in order to protect the gender identity of one Vermont boy. So, Mid Vermont sued.

Rather than take the case to court, where it seems that state has lost three times out of three attempts Alliance Defending Freedom has defended the religious freedom of Christians against the state’s adopted gender ideology, the two opponants decided to settle out of court. The settlement agreement awarded Mid Vermont Christian School and ADL $566,000.

Good.

I have never understood, and never will, how quickly society came to embrace gender ideology, the idea that a person was born in the “wrong” body, and the justifications used to change someone’s body, even a child’s body, for a social or political cause. This is not a medical cause. The evidence that transitioning a person, especially a child, from one sex to another (as if that could actually happen) benefits the child or adult is simply not there. That’s why Europe (of all places!) has stopped transitioning children, because they could not find evidence that it benefitted the child. But here in the US, we stand by the fantasy and demand that children, even as young as three or five years old, be traumatized by their parents insisting on transitioning them. Personally, I think such cases reveal the parent’s desires more than that of the child. I also do not understand how women’s organizations, such as the National Organization for Women, have abandoned their goal of protecting women’s rights in favor of protecting the “right” of a boy or man to compete against girls or women.

States have got to learn that they cannot discriminate against one group of people in order to protect another group of people from discrimination. No one should be expected to surrender their rights under the Constitution to make someone feel comfortable, or not offended, or accepted, or whatever. That is too high a price to pay to accomodate someone. If a school feels it is their right to play a boy against girls in a basketball competition, than the girls team ought to have the right to back out of that without being punished for refusing to embrace the state’s ideology. I’m glad Mid Vermont Christian School sued. I’m glad the settlement was substantial. I hope this will end the discrimination against schools that still take biology seriously. But I’m not optimistic. In any case, I think this case represents a turning point in the debate. People are getting fed up with 1) boys competing against girls, or men competing against women, and 2) the notion that everybody else needs to set their beliefs, their principles, and their rights aside in order to accomodate one person’s gender fantasy. Let’s hope the tide turns completely back to sanity.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.