Teacher fired by Catholic school for getting pregnant the ‘wrong way’


The Roman Catholic Church loves them some babies, babies from incest, babies from rape, babies from unmarried consenting adults, doesn’t matter. They’re all good. But their view on parents is whacked out. For example, when a teacher and her husband turned to in vitro fertilization, the church canned her despite exemplary performance. Not sure how this will play out legally, because it turns out churches get a special pass on discrimination unavailable to any other employer:

(HuffPo) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in January that religious workers can’t sue their employers for job discrimination because anti-discrimination laws allow for a “ministerial exception.” But the justices failed to define who was and who wasn’t a religious employee.”The Supreme Court didn’t give us a kind of neat little on-off test as to who’s a minister and who isn’t,” said Rick Garnett, associate dean and professor of law at Notre Dame Law School.

In a similar case in Ohio, a federal judge last month gave the go-ahead for a trial in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Cincinnati by a parochial school teacher who was fired after she became pregnant through artificial insemination, which the church is also against. The archdiocese fired Christa Dias in 2010, saying the single woman violated church doctrine.

U.S. District Judge Arthur Spiegel said in his March 29 ruling that the ministerial exception did not apply because Dias was a non-Catholic computer teacher with no role in ministering or teaching Catholic doctrine.

OK, fine. So what would stop a “church” from setting up shop, using neo-confederate theology, and discriminating against whatever minorities, they happened to feel superior to? What would stop a mosque or a synagogue from following suit?

Comments

  1. says

    If artificial insemination is evil, would they oppose aborting an artificially inseminated embryo?

    Also: The Catholic Church opposes the concept of a woman getting pregnant while knowing not a man?

  2. steve oberski says

    I’m still waiting for the Roman Catholic Church’s official policy on whether it’s OK for kiddy raping priests to wear a condom and if it would be grounds for dismissal if they did.

  3. Randomfactor says

    Got to hand it to the RCC for being consistent at least–their objection to IVF is that several fertilized eggs are created and wasted for every one that “catches,” making it functionally equivalent to multiple homicide by their lights.

    Kinda like the way their “god” does it, of course, but then they’ve no quarrel with HIS billion-year killing spree on Earth.

  4. interrobang says

    I do see why. Not only is it expensive and difficult, but there’s a heck of a lot of anti-adoption/adoptee prejudice out there. Maybe when the culture stops telling people in general that people who adopt are “settling” and that they should really be having their genetically own kids, and that adoptive parents don’t really love their adoptive kids, and when Catholic priests stop saying or implying that families formed by adoption aren’t “real” in the eyes of the Church, maybe Catholics would consider adoption rather than IVF…

  5. d cwilson says

    Ironically, today is take your unholy spawn to work day, which means in my office, all the urchins are shuttled into a separate room to engage in a bunch of activities that have absolutely nothing to do with what actually goes on here.

    I agree with interrobang. There is serious prejudice against adoption. Just recently a catholic bishop even lumped adoptive kids in with gays and others he felt are “evil”.

    The Catholic church is run by an all-male club who are supposed to swear off any contact with icky girly parts (underage boy-flesh is any entirely different matter). It’s no wonder many of them don’t have a healthy understanding of the plumbing.

  6. 'Tis Himself says

    I’m still waiting for the Roman Catholic Church’s official policy on whether it’s OK for kiddy raping priests to wear a condom and if it would be grounds for dismissal if they did.

    As long as the priest goes to confession, says three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys, and gets transferred to a new parish, he’s good with the church.

    Since altar boys don’t get pregnant from anal sex, the condom’s contraception function becomes moot and the STD function is the only attribute in effect. And who knows what those altar boys might be infected with.

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