A Loudoun County, Virginia father who was arrested for refusing to leave a heated 2021 school board meeting that was shut down by the district superintendent has been vindicated by a judge who agreed he was well within his First Amendment rights when he acted as he did.
“My thanks to God for justice,” Jon Tigges wrote on Twitter after the ruling from Loudoun Circuit Judge Douglas Fleming Jr. that cleared him of any charges.
Jon Tigges, a devout believer, was arrested in June 2021 and later found guilty by a Loudon district court for trespass when he demanded the opportunity to speak to the school board after it was declared an “unlawful assembly” by then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler.
Ziegler, who has since been fired and indicted by a grand jury over the alleged (but might we say, well-substantiated) claims that he covered up an on-campus rape that occurred in a girls’ bathroom and was perpetrated by a boy who was wearing a skirt.
The disgraced former superintendent would go on to declare during another school board meeting that there had been no assaults on campus when he would have been well aware of the teen girls’ assault. The victims’ father, Scott Smith, was also arrested just a month before Tigges when he became belligerent after hearing Ziegler deny the heinous act taken against his daughter under the controversial transgender bathroom policies in the school district.
These policies as well as other glaring issues ranging from lessons incorporating the critical race theory paradigm into lessons, the firing of a Christian teacher who refused to use student’s preferred pronouns, and other issues made Loudoun County ground zero for the parental rights movement, and when Tigges was arrested he had joined hundreds who showed up to voice their objections to the school board.
Yet the meeting was so well-attended that it prompted the board to shut it down, before
“I just felt led to realize that we could still speak,” Tigges told The Federalist at the time. “It’s a public forum, a public room. It had been scheduled until seven o’clock for people to speak. I stood up to encourage folks to stay and if they had something to say whether they were on the left or the right, didn’t matter. They’d be heard and we’d respect one another and do so and so people started doing that without any amplification at all and you could hear them fine because it was a peaceful assembly.”
Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheory pic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
— Gabriella Borter (@gabriellaborter) June 22, 2021
Also worthy of note, Tigges arrest was one of the incidents pointed to by the National School Board Association last year when it wrote an open letter to the Biden administration urging the Department of Justice to investigate such lively school board protests as domestic terrorism.
This is something the NSBA has since recanted — yet not before the FBI was ordered by the DOJ to do just what they called for and probe parents who protested controversial school district policies like the one that resulted in the rape of a teenage girl in Loudon.
“Despite this victory, I have serious concerns about where we are as a country. We’ve been subverted by a darkness that is spilling out in rot at all levels and in both political parties,” Tigges also wrote this week, voicing a well-founded warning. “Nothing will change until We the People value conviction over comfort.”
He also told The Blaze that what happened to him has opened his eyes to “to just how deep and dark the rabbit hole of evil really is. Helped me see that real freedom is grounded on (1) faith, (2) family, and (3) friends — not government.”
“God has never been more real or personal in my life,” he added.
“God’s people sin by their silence. Faith without works is dead,” he also said. “We don’t trust God when we display inaction in the face of justice.”
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