Social studies
teacher Jerry Buell, who was voted Teacher of the
Year by pupils at Mount Dora High School last year, has said he plans to
use his experience to teach his students and others outside of school about
First Amendment rights, his lawyer Harry Mihet told US news website The
Christian Post.

Buell wrote on his
Facebook page that same-sex unions were a sin.

Officials from the
Lake County School District were told about the comments by a former student.

On being informed of
the comments, they reassigned Mr Buell to a clerical position at the district
office. The teacher missed the first three days of school inside his classroom
as a result of the suspension.

Mr Buell’s
reinstatement by the district included exoneration from any wrong-doing and came in the form of a personnel
communication to the teacher, said Mr Mihet, who is the senior litigation lawyer
at Liberty Counsel, which defends religious
freedom.

“They concluded that
he had not violated any code or statute,” Mr Mihet said. “He is elated to be
reinstated, and most importantly to be cleared of any wrong-doing. He feels that his First Amendment rights
have been restored and upheld.”

The Constitution and
U.S. law is very clear that government should not regulate what teachers or
other government employees say on their own time in private and personal
capacities, the lawyer said. The law also protects school staff in regards to
what they post on social media sites, he said.

“The government may
tell Jerry what he can do or say while he is a teacher acting on behalf of the
government, but when Jerry clocks out at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and becomes
a private citizen, the government cannot tell him what he can think about an
issue such as homosexual marriage or what he can say,” Mihet
said.

“It doesn’t matter
whether Jerry voices his opposition to homosexual marriage in the privacy of his
home with one or two people listening, on a Facebook page with 20 friends or
2,000 friends, on a blog, on a radio station, from the rooftop, or the mountain
top.

“The First Amendment
absolutely protects his privilege to comment on an issue of public importance in
public. The First Amendment is meaningless if it only protects speech that no
one else can hear or it only protects speech that is warm and
fuzzy.”