John Klar: Superintendent Millington violates Constitution in Chick-fil-A, BLM flag fight

In the recent conflagration over a Chick-fil-A fundraiser in Randolph, the Orange Southwest School District Superintendent Layne Millington (who is paid some $200,000 annually including benefits) has decided to single-handedly wage war against our nation’s First Amendment. He has already lost. Imposing rules where liberal views are celebrated while conservative messages are stifled, Millington ironically proclaims he is making everything equal. It may take a lawsuit for him to learn just how completely wrong he is, but the rest of the nation can see clearly.

Orange Southwest School District

Layne Millington, Orange Southwest School District Superintendent

Supintendent Millington canceled a baseball team fundraiser solely because it elected to raise funds with the out-of-state fast-food franchise, on the basis that Chick-fil-A didn’t support gay marriage. Gay marriage is legal, but like abortion, not all Americans agree it is moral — but Millington insists all students must comply. Millington faults a corporate entity for a moral transgression, then attacks parents and students vicariously. How far will this moral tracing go?

Parents were understandably outraged, but Millington has stood firm. Trying to manipulate parents, he scheduled a special informational meeting on the subject, and was then incensed when parents declined to attend and instead voice their views at a public school board meeting — exactly what Millington was trying to prevent. Parents instead chose to share their complaint with ears that might listen, so they attended the school board meeting and expressed their disgust.

Mr. Millington foolishly decided to double down on his boldly illegal move. Invoking a school policy requiring that the administration “treat all with respect,” he indignantly proclaimed (at 45:50):

And I ask you, which is less respectful: asking the baseball team to change vendors for a fundraiser, or asking the LGBTQ community, of which there’s about 7-10% in our school district, to support as part of the school collective, a company that has actively tried to take away their civil rights for nearly a decade? I don’t think there’s an equivalency here. The act of seeking to take away a group’s civil rights, rights that all other human beings share, is an attempt to make them less human. The decision that was made was the right one.

The self-righteousness is deafening. The effort to displace the U.S. Constitution with this platitude is indeed a false equivalency — the Constitution does not bow for such shoddy, illogical efforts. Mr. Millington has apparently lost his understanding of words and facts. He is labeling a company’s past free speech as “an act to try to take away rights” — no, it was just an alternate opinion, speech he seeks to stifle. The great irony is that Layne Millington actually is acting in a way to deprive others of “shared rights” — he isn’t just talking about it, he has done so. Unlike a distant-past corporate speech offense, this is a present government actionby a government actor, stifling freedom of speech!

Government officials incapable of comprehending their basic constitutional obligations are unfit to govern. After the school board meeting, Millington set off again to bully and manipulate parents and the community into cowed submission to his new totalitarianism, organizing another informal “meeting” for May 4. In his call to address this problem, he again projects fault onto the community and parents, displacing responsibility for the angst and division he and his dogma have seeded. On the Orangesouthwest.org website, in an April 15 letter to the community, he writes:

I have had a chance to finally get a few moments to talk with some good people and to reflect on the divisiveness that has been growing in our community and affecting our schools. Schools are reflections of their communities, if there is divisiveness in our schools, it is because it exists in our communities and to a lesser extent the world at large.  The staff and administration have been spending an ever-increasing amount of time in school trying to stem this tide which had made it painfully obvious that unless we address the sources that exist outside our walls, we will never have peace within our walls.

This is nonsense: conservative Vermont parents are “good people.” Flying the BLM flag and policing students from wearing conservative messaging on their clothes (such as “There are only two genders,” “I love Chick-fil-A,” or “Let’s Go Brandon”) while permitting free speech to liberal views, is what has seeded this conflict. Millington has broken all the rules to advance his personal new religion, and now blames the hate and division he and others have seeded on the parents.

Until the U.S. Constitution is reestablished as the law of Randolph Union High School, there will be increasing rancor. This is the direct result of racist “theories” and gender experimentation “theories” that condition children to embrace only one moral compass.

But Superintendent Millington purports to seek comity:

On May 4th at 7:15 PM in the RUHS auditorium, I will run a community forum in the hopes of drawing in perspectives from across the community to share ideas on how we can make the district a better place for all who work, attend, and serve here. This cannot devolve into a gripe or blame session; it must be a simple recognition of our current state and a forum to generate the agreements we need to make to one another to heal and to improve our community and our schools. … I am still working out the details, but the forum will start with a short video clip that I hope will inspire our work followed by a short presentation on where I believe we currently stand and then a guided discussion on possible solutions  that would be developed into an agreement, a memorandum of understanding between one another in terms of what we must all do to improve the culture and climate of not only our schools, but hopefully the community as a whole. This can only work if all perspectives are present and if our communications with one another are respectful and forward looking.

Will Herr Millington “guide the discussion” toward constitutional requisites, and identify where they have been violated by the school administration? Doubtful. He has already unilaterally rejected that “memorandum of understanding” and apparently seeks to reinvent that wheel. What is happening is that the school has seeded conflict and division with experimental theories it had no authority to implement, those toxic failures have now harmed children and the community with their obvious toxicity, and the bureaucrats are trying to shift blame onto their victims for the consequences. That cycle will repeat until the displaced Constitution is reaffirmed — there is no other path forward.

As one writer has aptly observed, “There is no possibility of progress without a return to the permanent principles of the Founding.” Superintendent Millington must take down the BLM flag and reinstall the United States Constitution he has so negligently and ignorantly undermined. He must learn what for most schoolchildren is axiomatic: “Freedom to speak openly means that we will sometimes hear what we disagree with. A free society isn’t always comfortable. But history shows that it’s worth it.”

RELATED: John Klar addresses OSSD School Board Meeting

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2022. All rights reserved.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/J Reed and Orange Southwest School District

9 thoughts on “John Klar: Superintendent Millington violates Constitution in Chick-fil-A, BLM flag fight

  1. Perhaps people on the left will slowly wake up and realize that they’ve been brainwashed: they’ve been fed one-sided information whose partial purpose is to suppress alternative information and open inquiry.

    I don’t know anyone who disagrees that black lives matter. We all do– or, the vast, vast majority of us do. However, I do know of a group that really doesn’t care about black lives, and that’s BLM.

    Why do I say that? Because BLM focuses on police killings when this problem is relatively easy to solve: better police training. But the much larger problem of poverty, drugs, and violence in neighborhoods of color (and that’s the central, concrete problem of “systemic racism,” isn’t it?) … well, they’re not going to touch the actual, concrete problems with a ten-foot pole, except to write words about how it’s all because of systemic racism. And they’re right, to a degree, but the concrete problems in poor neighborhoods of color aren’t just because of systemic racism, but because organizations like BLM haven’t worked to create jobs, opportunities, financial institutions that serve the community, etc., in those neighborhoods (so let’s ask: is BLM itself just a trick by the supremacist mindset for more systemic racism? Are those folks themselves unconsciously infected with the virus of white supremacy??) BLM has apparently gotten billions of dollars in donations from big business and no doubt could get billions more to apply to under-served neighborhoods to serve them, if they made half an effort to do so.

    Look up what black pastor Corey Brooks says about BLM on the south side of Chicago: he asks, where were they? They were burning cities and even burning minority-owned businesses, but what were they doing for the violent south side of Chicago to make things better? Answer: nothing.

    Scholar C. Bradley Thompson has a good analysis of the origins of the CRT world-view, here: https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/critical-race-theory-and-the-long?s=r He makes the case that CRT and BLM are part of the effort to establish a socialist revolution after the violent revolution of the proletariat failed to materialize in liberal countries; the goal of the Frankfurt School in Germany was then to infiltrate and undermine liberal (in the old sense of the word) institutions in order to spread the doctrines of authoritarian socialism. But none of this is about free speech and critical thinking to sort out our problems (as Thompson argues, one of the goals is to suppress speech); it’s about indoctrination into a particular world-view (such as BLM or CRT) instead of setting world-views side-by-side and thinking about what they are and what they mean, in an open inquiry. Perhaps this goal of indoctrination is why the Biden administration feels compelled to set up a Ministry of Truth.

  2. I have said this over and over again.
    We all stood here in utter shock when the aid sat on the docks undistributed in Puerto Rico as the people died.. and how did that happen? all sorts of political reasons, the people were literally paralyzed from red tape and not a damn soul knew what to do.. the people have been dehumaized and lulled into being deaf, mute and dumb sheep.

    It’s these things right here that lead to a population of people that did that..

    Getting off our asses and acting needs to be the norm- not writing about it and then thinking we did something and now we are done.
    What I see here that is most noteworthy is John doing something, like getting in the car and doing something real.

    The bottom line is that everything we see going on today across this nation is going on because we are allowing it to happen.

    When are Americans going to defend our kids, our future, other Americans, our nation in real and meaningful ways?
    There is one side working on destroying our nation as the other side reads about it and says how bad this is.

    Thank you John for all you do.. too bad I’m so honest, I’d vote for you here from NH, everyone does it.

  3. ”It may take a lawsuit for him to learn” says Attorney Klar. Get done John! All talk, no walk.

  4. I’m really starting to believe that a lot of these sorts—superintendents, principals and even teachers—are ‘plants’ and not people. They were ‘programmed’ and shipped here from God knows where. Interacting with them often makes me wonder who put them up to this?

    • Oh what you speak of is NOT a coincidence. While we are the very tip of this nasty experiment, it is also being carried out,landed and prchestrated across the united states, many are unwitting pawns, so filled with pride the couldn’t possibly be wrong. These people,are very easily manipulated. Give them some money and then set up a cancel culture environment to keep people on line and you have control of the complete educational system, feeding upon its own.

      Those in the military who are working on the active suberion of the country refer to them as useful idiots, not my term. Yuri Bezmanov lays it all out in a video

  5. You dont “take away someone’s civil rights” by displaying a slogan. What is egregious is taking away someone’s Constitutionally guaranteed right of free expression, especially under a government-enforced double standard. Opinions differ on what constitutes “hateful speech” therefore all opinions and statements must be allowed or limited equally, withing the limits of the Constitution. Homosexuality is widely recognized as taboo by many adherents of the world’s major religions. Why is it’s open promotion by a government-run school not also called “hate speech” for violating the religious freedom of some students of faith? In the US and Vermont homosexuality is legal, same-sex couples have the option of marriage and our civil rights and public accommodation laws prohibit discrimination based on orientation. That’s not bad considering that in some parts of the world, homosexual behavior is subject to the death penalty. Schools need to stop rubbing the rainbow flag in people’s faces like a dirty sock.
    How does someone like this end up in Orange County, Vermont anyhow?

  6. Fire him.

    “The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.”
    -Associate Justice Hugo L. Black

    “Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.” Thurgood Marshall-Supreme Court Justice

  7. I will so love to have you in the senate. Oh my, there will be debates. Lol

    And we will find quickly who defends their sworn duty. God speed.

  8. Let us not forget he is of the same ilk as our Republican governor who also supports B.L.M., a subversive, racist, Black Separatist, Communist Con artist group.

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