Christian school goes back to court after facing consequences for anti-trans bigotry

Mid Vermont Christian School refused to abide by anti-discrimination laws. But they still want access to state-sponsored benefits.

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

A bigoted Christian school that was kicked out of a Vermont state-sanctioned sports league is going back to court demanding the opportunity to compete in tournaments despite refusing to play against certain teams with transgender athletes.

All of this goes back to early 2023 when Mid Vermont Christian School (MVCS) was a #12 seed slated to play against #5 Long Trail School in the Division IV bracket to win the Girls Basketball State Championship.

MVCS refused to play, however, because Long Trail had a trans player on the team.

Mid Vermont Christian School (screenshot via YouTube)

MVCS Head of School Vicky Fogg made a predictably awful comment in defense of her school’s decision:

“We withdrew from the tournament because we believe playing against an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players. Allowing biological males to participate in women’s sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women’s sports in general.”

She didn’t explain how a trans athlete would impact the “safety” of her players. She didn’t say how the game would be unfair. Like so many right-wing bigots, she used buzzwords so she wouldn’t have to go into details. As research has shown, there’s no consistent evidence showing that trans athletes have a competitive advantage in women’s sports. More importantly, this was high school. It wasn’t even professional. It was meant to be fun—intended to celebrate the journey more than the outcomes.

For all her supposed concerns about the threat to women’s sports, by forfeiting the game, the Christian school denied all the girls a chance to display their skills on the court.

For what it’s worth, Long Trail had a 14-6 record during the regular season (hardly undefeated) and lost the next game in the tournament by a fairly significant margin, 45-26.

That’s when the people running the tournament took an important next step. The Vermont Principals’ Association, which oversees high school athletic competitions in the state, made clear they would stand by their inclusive policies. They have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to “discrimination based on a student’s actual or perceived sex and gender.”

The game had already been forfeited by the time the VPA learned what had happened, so they didn’t need to take immediate action.

Two weeks later, though, they made it official: Mid Vermont Christian School would no longer be allowed to participate in VPA-sponsored athletic events. It was a unanimous vote of the 15-member executive committee. It wasn’t even a hard call; state law forbids discrimination against out trans athletes. Still, it was nice to see an athletic association do the right thing and not cave in to the demands of ignorant conservatives.

Jay Nichols, the VPA’s executive director, put it bluntly: “If you don’t want to follow VPA rules, that’s fine… But then you're just not a VPA member.”

MVCS immediately did what right-wing Christians do best: They pretended they were being persecuted and announced plans to appeal the decision:

“Mid Vermont Christian school is disappointed with the decision of the VPA Executive Council to ban us from participation in all VPA activities. We intend to appeal the decision,” the head of school at MVCS, Vicky Fogg, said in an email. “Canceling our membership is not a solution and does nothing to deal with the very real issue of safety and fairness facing women’s sports in our beloved state. We urge the VPA to reconsider its policies, and balance the rights of every athlete in the state.”

Somehow, “safety and fairness” didn’t bother any other team that played against Long Trail because no one else took the coward’s way out...

The school then amped up its victim complex by suing state officials for not accepting their anti-trans beliefs. Last November, right-wing legal group Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of the school and two families claiming that the state violated the school’s First Amendment rights “by preventing them from practicing their religious beliefs about sexuality and gender.”

When the Christian school reluctantly forfeited a girls’ high school basketball game against a team that had a male athlete playing for them, the [Vermont Principals’ Association] kicked Mid Vermont Christian out of the association. Now, despite 28 years of prior participation in the league, the school cannot compete in any VPA athletics, effectively blacklisting the school from all state-sponsored events in the state, including VPA spring sports for which schools are still creating schedules. The VPA is going so far as to exclude Mid Vermont Christian and its students from participating in co-ed academic competitions like the Geo-Bee, Science and Math Fair, and Debate and Forensics League, all because the school believes biological differences between boys and girls matter.

Well, yeah. That’s how it works. If the private Christian school didn’t want to abide by the public entity’s rules, then they had no right to demand access to the benefits. Sure, they could have formed their own Christian Bigot league and organized events with other like-minded schools across the state, but they demanded entry into the public league despite refusing to play by the league’s rules.

To put it another way, the Christian school chose this route, not the state. The state was already being generous by giving the private school the ability to compete against other teams.

The 71-page lawsuit cited Supreme Court decisions (like Carson v. Makin) that said if a state offered certain benefits to public schools, they couldn’t deny those benefits to private (usually Christian) schools. But the lawsuit failed to note how, in response to the Makin case, Maine lawmakers passed a law forbidding any taxpayer dollars from going to schools that discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In response to that law, the anti-LGBTQ Christian schools in Maine said they would rather reject the benefits than follow the state’s rules.

In Vermont, however, the Christian school wanted access to the state benefits without following the state’s rules. You didn’t have to be a lawyer to grasp how the situations weren’t identical.

The lawsuit also noted that the Vermont Agency of Education, in 2022, just like in Maine, passed laws requiring all private schools that wanted taxpayer-funded tuition dollars to obey non-discrimination laws. Mid Vermont Christian said no, which is why they were not designated as an “approved independent school.” That decision meant the Christian school couldn’t get access to public funds (specifically, the “State's Town Tuitioning and Dual Enrollment Programs”).

That’s why the lawsuit went after state education officials as well as those running the athletic competitions. They even laid out their choices, as if both were impossible for them to adopt:

The State has thus put Plaintiffs to an impossible Hobson's Choice: (1) abandon their religious beliefs, character, and practices and adopt and follow the State's gender identity rules so they can participate in school athletics and the Town Tuitioning Program, or (2) adhere to their religious beliefs, character, and practices, miss out on middle school and high school sports, lose valuable tuition reimbursements, and inevitably lose students necessary to keep its doors open.

Once again, this was a “Hobson’s Choice” of the Christian school’s own making. There was no reason to allow them to have their cake and eat it, too. They wanted to discriminate against LGBTQ students and have access to state dollars. They couldn’t have both. They needed to decide whether faith-based bigotry was more important to them than their own existence.

At no point should anyone have felt bad for them. If that school didn’t want to compete for transphobic reasons, that was their call. They didn’t deserve to be rewarded for it by continuing to have access to strong competition and an established league. Similarly, they didn’t deserve to have access to tuition dollars if they discriminated against LGBTQ students.

They were never punished for their Christian beliefs. They were punished for refusing to adhere to rules that amounted to nothing more than showing basic human decency.

Ultimately, that’s how a judge saw it too. He dismissed the request for a preliminary injunction in June, writing that Vermont officials applied their rules fairly across the board and weren’t singling out the Christian school in any way. If the Christian school planned to forfeit games against teams with trans athletes, the VPA had every right to kick them out.

And now the Christian school is appealing the decision. In a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, the right-wing lawyers say their expulsion amounts to religious discrimination.

They claim the league allowed other teams to forfeit without penalty… while citing cases in which schools forfeited basketball games “during the COVID-19 pandemic” against a team with a student who had a mask exemption. Those teams weren’t kicked out of the league! But there’s no reason to believe the rules weren’t applied fairly. If the Christian school made the same request, to forfeit a game rather than play against an athlete more likely to spread COVID, they would not have been penalized for it. (A refusal to accept the very real threat of COVID takes up several paragraphs in the appeal.)

The appeal also claims the VPA harbored “hostility” towards the Christian school by kicking them out—and the argument comes with a heavy dose of transphobia. The lawyers won’t even accept the existence of trans people, misgendering the athlete in question.

That the VPA has only applied its newfound forfeiture-justifies-expulsion policy to religious schools that cannot compete against males who identify as female is "reason to suspect that the object" of the VPA's enforcement is "to target those beliefs and to exclude those who maintain them."

Whether the appellate court will agree with any of that is an open question. But the argument that “Mid Vermont would be eligible to participate in the VPA but for its religious exercise” is bullshit. They were never kicked out for being Christian. They were kicked out for being bigots, and the law was already clear on how that’s unacceptable.

Lost in the shuffle here are all the athletes at the Christian school who are now deprived of the opportunity to showcase their skills and earn possible scholarships, all because the people running their school decided to prioritize hate over competition. The administrators made clear that they don’t really care about students anyway. After all, they took their Christian hatred out on an athlete on another team because she didn’t fit into their rigid gender molds. No one should be shocked that their selfish actions now affect their own students.

The school chose this path. It’s long past time they accept the consequences for it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

---