The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Michigan and Ohio employers) recently addressed whether a public university violated a professor’s rights under the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses when it disciplined him for refusing to use the pronouns requested by a student.
Nicholas Meriwether is a “devout Christian” and philosophy professor at Shawnee State University, a small public institution in Ohio. The university enacted a policy requiring faculty members to “refer to students by their ‘preferred pronoun[s],’” regardless of their “convictions or views on the subject.”
