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A lower court held that a Massachusetts school district was within its rights to fire Kari MacRae, and the Supreme Court won't revisit that.
The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear the appeal of a teacher who lost her lawsuit against a Massachusetts school district that fired her for homophobic, transphobic, and racist social media posts.
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Kari MacRae was fired by the Hanover Public Schools in 2021, about a month after she was hired to be a math and business teacher. School officials had discovered the posts, which were made before she worked for the district.
Memes that she posted, reposted, liked, or shared on TikTok included one with a photo of Adm. Rachel Levine, the transgender woman who was assistant secretary for health in President Joe Biden’s administration. The accompanying text read, “‘I’m an expert on mental health and food disorders.’ ... says the obese man who thinks he’s a woman.” Another showed a large, bearded man saying his name is Meagan and he was going to compete in a girls’ track meet.
“Another displayed a photo of a panda with text that reads: ‘Dude, racism is stupid. I am black, white, and Asian. But everyone loves me,’ according to court records,” Reuters notes. She had made other posts objecting to "critical race theory" and gender transition.
When the school district fired MacRae, it sent a letter saying, “Continuing your employment in light of your social media posts would have a significant negative impact on student learning.”
MacRae sued in federal court, claiming her First Amendment rights to free speech had been violated. The trial court ruled that those rights were not absolute and that the school district could take potential disruption into consideration, so it dismissed her suit in 2023. The judge in that case also found that school administrators were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects public officials from certain legal actions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed, so MacRae went to the Supreme Court.
The high court declined her case without comment, except for a lengthy statement from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. He agreed with his colleagues’ decision to decline MacRae’s appeal, but he took issue with the First Circuit’s ruling that the posts were disruptive. “It undermines core First Amendment values to allow a government employer to adopt an institutional viewpoint on the issues of the day and then, when faced with a dissenting employee, portray this disagreement as evidence of disruption,” he wrote. “And, the problem is exacerbated in the case of an employee such as MacRae, who expressed her views only outside the workplace and before her employment.”
MacRae’s appeal didn’t specifically address this matter, which is why he sided with the other justices in dismissing it, he wrote. However, he said that in some case that does, he would seek to assure that public employers couldn’t use “unsupported claims of disruption in particular to target employees who express disfavored political views.”
MacRae, a Republican, ran for Massachusetts State Senate in 2022 and 2024 but did not win. She is running again in 2026.
