On Monday, the Liberty Justice Center, famous for its victory in the 2018 case Janus v. AFSCME, filed a motion urging an Oregon court to reinstate a high school track and field coach who was fired after he proposed a separate division for transgender athletes so girls could only compete against other girls.

John Parks, an Oregon track and field coach for 40 years, wrote an open letter proposing a separate division for transgender athletes in a track and field state championship. In June, he was fired by the Lake Oswego School District and the Lake Oswego School Board. He was accused of harassing transgender athletes at recent track meets, a claim Parks says is false.

On July 24, the Liberty Justice Center filed a First Amendment lawsuit on Parks’ behalf. The Center contends the firing of Parks in alleged retaliation for the letter violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Liberty Justice Center has filed multiple declarations from parents whose children competed on the Lake Oswego track and field team under Coach Parks in 2024 that want Parks reinstated.

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“School employees do not lose their constitutional right to free speech when they step onto school grounds,” Buck Dougherty, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, stated. “Coach Parks faced unjust and unconstitutional retaliation at the hands of the Lake Oswego School District and School Board. We urge the court to grant a preliminary injunction to uphold his First Amendment rights.”

In Janus, the Supreme Court held  that the State of Illinois’ “extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public-sector employees violated the First Amendment,” according to Oyez, an exploration and archive of Supreme Court rulings, adding, “the Court concluded that the state’s collection of agency fees from nonconsenting public employees was a violation of the First Amendment … the Court stated that requiring individuals to endorse ideas they disagreed with runs counter to First Amendment principles, and that even under a more permissive standard than the ‘exacting’ strict scrutiny that the Court had applied in evaluating the constitutionality of agency fees in the past, the Illinois scheme could not pass muster.”