A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a Christian school in the Upper Valley that forfeited a basketball game rather than play a team with a transgender athlete should be allowed back into Vermont’s high school sports league. Mid Vermont Christian School was banned by the Vermont Principals’ Association, which governs interscholastic sports in the state, in 2023.
The unanimous decision from a three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that allowed the ban to remain in place while the case played out in court. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful conservative law firm that has won several precedent-setting cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, brought the lawsuit on behalf of the Quechee school.
U.S. Circuit Court Judge Michael Park wrote in the decision that the school was likely to succeed on the merits of its case. And he wrote that, in initially banning Mid Vermont Christian from all VPA-sponsored events — including spelling bees, science fairs, drama festivals and debate competitions — the association had acted in a way that was “unprecedented, overbroad, and procedurally irregular.”
The ruling did not directly address whether states can require religious entities to abide by anti-discrimination rules in order to qualify for public benefits. Instead, it relied on public statements made by Jay Nichols, VPA’s executive director, to argue the association’s decision was motivated by religious animus.
Soon after Mid Vermont Christian forfeited their playoff game, according to the ruling, Nichols spoke about the incident to state lawmakers in the context of a debate about public funding to religious schools.
“Thank goodness the student in question didn’t attend that religious school,” Nichols said of the transgender athlete. He asked whether Vermont would condone such “blatant discrimination under the guise of religious freedom.”
“The VPA’s Executive Director publicly castigated Mid Vermont — and religious schools generally — while the VPA rushed to judgment on whether and how to discipline the school,” Park wrote. “In upholding the expulsion, the VPA doubled down on that hostility by challenging the legitimacy of the school’s religious beliefs.”
“The government cannot punish religious schools — and the families they serve — by permanently kicking them out of state-sponsored sports simply because the state disagrees with their religious beliefs,” ADF senior counsel David Cortman said in a statement.
For years, conservative legal groups have sought to push the courts further to the right on the subject of religious freedom, particularly as it intersects with anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ communities. Peter Teachout, a law professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that the court’s somewhat narrow ruling generally echoed recent Supreme Court decisions and was “not novel or groundbreaking.”
The state can still impose anti-discrimination rules, Teachout said. But it has to be careful how it does so.
The ruling, however, suggests “that officials need to exercise caution about making anti-religious statements in enforcing anti-discrimination laws,” he wrote.
In an email, Nichols wrote that the VPA does “not harbor any hostility toward religious viewpoints,” but declined to comment further.
The court’s ruling should allow the students of Mid Vermont Christian back on the court. Monica Allard, a staff attorney at the Vermont ACLU, said in a statement that does not mean Vermont’s transgender athletes should now leave the field of play.
“While this ruling is disappointing, it’s important to underscore that the court did not rule against Vermont’s policy of including trans kids in school sports,” Allard wrote. “This decision does not impact the rights of trans kids to participate fully in school activities — or the responsibilities of schools to ensure that all students have equitable access to educational and extracurricular opportunities.”
