6th Circuit sides with college prof on religious objection to student's pronouns request

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.

Facts

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."

In January 2018, Meriwether acknowledged a student as "sir," upon which the student disclosed she identifies as a woman and requested the use of "feminine titles and pronouns." The professor "wasn't sure" whether he could "comply" with the request, so he asked university officials to implement some alternatives to the pronoun policy.

In particular, Meriwether proposed he would use either (1) no pronouns when interacting with the student or (2) the requested pronouns, but only after placing a "disclaimer" in his syllabus "noting that he was doing so under compulsion and setting forth his personal and religious beliefs about gender identity." Shawnee State endorsed neither "accommodation" and eventually presented the professor with two options: