Sign in Subscribe
The Discerner

I Have Clicked Through Every Training My Employer Ever Sent Me. Valerie Kloosterman Read Hers.

She had been there seventeen years. The training asked her to agree to something. Five years later it ended in a settlement, and the part worth noticing is how quiet the decision was.

I Have Clicked Through Every Training My Employer Ever Sent Me. Valerie Kloosterman Read Hers.

I do not know how many compliance modules I have completed. I know how many I have read, which is a different and much smaller number, and I know the exact sound my laptop fan makes while I wait out the minimum viewing time on a slide about data handling.

There is a rhythm to it. Advance, advance, advance. A cartoon person in a cardigan asks a question with one obviously correct answer. You get it right. A green check appears. At the end there is a box, and you tick the box, and the box says you agree, and then it is Thursday again and you have agreed to something.

In August 2021 a physician assistant in western Michigan reached the box and stopped.

Valerie Kloosterman had worked at what is now University of Michigan Health West for seventeen years. The training in front of her required her to use patients’ chosen pronouns and to refer patients for gender transition procedures. She asked for a religious accommodation instead. Three weeks later she was not employed there.

Last month, on the twenty ninth of July, the case ended. Almost five years, one federal district opinion, one unanimous appeals panel, and then a settlement: four hundred and ten thousand dollars in damages and legal fees to Kloosterman and her attorneys, and a new hospital policy letting staff opt out of work that conflicts with their religious beliefs. It was announced eighteen days before you are reading this. I have been chewing on it since.

Here is what I keep circling. The moment that decided all of it was not dramatic. There was no sermon in a corridor, no speech, nobody’s hand on a Bible. There was a woman at a screen who read what was actually on it.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, most of what obedience looks like now.

We inherited a set of pictures for this. Lions. A furnace. The apostle in front of the council saying he cannot help but speak. And those pictures are true, and this week Christians in Fuyang and Raipur and the Nuba Mountains are living inside them, and I am not going to pretend a personnel matter in Grand Rapids belongs in that company. It does not. Nobody took Valerie Kloosterman’s children. Nobody burned anything.

But there is an older scene that fits better, and it is quieter than we remember. A young man in a foreign civil service is assigned the king’s food, and the text does not say he preached or protested or wept. It says he resolved. Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself. The whole hinge of the story is an interior decision about a menu, made before anyone was watching, and everything downstream from it, the lions and the writing on the wall and the rest, is consequence rather than cause.

The menu is the module now. The king’s table is a mandatory annual training with a progress bar. And the thing about a progress bar is that it is designed, quite deliberately, to be advanced through rather than considered.

I want to be careful here, because there are two ways to get this wrong and I am tempted by both.

The first is triumphalism. A settlement is not a verdict. The hospital admitted nothing. Judge Jane Beckering let Kloosterman’s free exercise, equal protection and Title VII claims go forward in 2023, but she threw out the free speech claim, holding that Kloosterman had been speaking as an employee and not as a citizen, which is a real limit and an unglamorous one. The new policy binds one hospital system in one state. It is a door held open, not a wall knocked down.

The second is pretending the cost is one sided. On the other side of that opt out is a patient in an examination room who will be referred elsewhere, and whatever you believe about that referral, it is not free for the person receiving it. A conscience protection is a real thing that lands on real people. I would rather live in a country that grants it than one that does not, and I would rather say plainly that it lands than dress it up as costing nobody anything.

What I actually take from this is smaller and harder than either.

Five years. That is what the box cost her. Not martyrdom. Five years of depositions and legal correspondence and telling the story again to strangers, and a career interrupted in the middle, and at the end of it a sum of money that will not buy back the five years and was never going to.

I have never paid anything like that for anything I believe. I am not sure I have ever paid the attention.

So the box is still there, on the last slide, and it still says you agree. Most weeks it will be about data handling and it will not matter at all. Occasionally it will not be about data handling.

The only spiritual discipline I can think to recommend from any of this is embarrassingly practical. Read it. Read the thing before you tick the thing. Not so you can sue anybody. So that whatever you end up agreeing to on a Thursday afternoon, you agreed to it on purpose.

If this is the sort of thinking you want more of, members keep it running. No pressure. Just glad you are here.

Sources

Read next

Comments ()