Unmarried Catholic School Teacher Fired
You are an unmarried female. You teach in a Catholic school. You sign a contract, which among other things stipulates that you must "teach and act" in a manner that is in keeping with the "precepts and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church". OK, tough rule but hey Disney has tough rules too and yet most of their employees love them, so you deal with it.
Fast forward 18 weeks:
You tell your principle you are pregnant. You get fired for violating "the clause". Fair or Unfair?
My first reaction was they can't do that. Its discriminatory. Pregnant women have special protections under the law. Then upon further reflection I decided, well you signed the contract with "that clause" in it so ..... your out of luck; the church is within its rights.
Now for the reason I have a love / hate relationship with lawyers. Of course you knew she was suing right? After all this is America, and as the song goes: the laaa-nd of the free and the home of the lawsuit. What? That's not how you remember it? Whatever, lets get back to the story. The lawyers say lets assume you can enforce "the clause", fine, but you CANNOT do it in a discriminatory fashion. How do you determine which of your employees are having premarital sex, which the church forbids? Among all the men and women in your employ, only one type has a tell tale sign of being in violation, the PREGNANT ONE! That is the discrimination. Since the violation is the sex itself, the church must find a way to enforce it fairly and equally,and except for the smile on their face you cant tell if men have had sex or not! Or women for that matter, unless they are unfortunate enough to become pregnant. You see its not the pregnancy that is a violation, can't be, because the only remedy for that is an even bigger sin. So what to do? Birth control? Another sin, albeit undetectable. I say that all unmarried employees be subject to the elation test. Anyone who shows up for work with a smile on their face and a bounce in their step must go straight to the principles office for further investigation. And that includes priests and nuns.
posted by D. Coder | 4:37 AM
2 Comments:
To Whom It May Concern;
"Since the violation is the sex itself,
the church must find a way to enforce it fairly and
equally,"
If the lawyers can win on this then almost no "rules" can be enforced on anyone, for any reason.
Let us look at the lawyer's reasoning. It is not whether you get caught or not that should allow the "rule", but whether you can enforce it upon everyone equally. In other words, it matters if you break the rule in the first place. Since the Church can't stop that, then there should be no rule. Does this sound correct?
Imagine a world where such a system was in place. Since the law enforcement agency can not stop all speeders from speeding then we can not have a law against speeding since the only ones that we know for sure are speeding are the ones who get caught! Or the airline industry can not tell their pilots that they are not allowed to fly while using certain drugs, again, because the only way that we can tell for sure who is getting "high in the sky" is when someone is caught! One can easily see my point.
What a ridiculous concept.
Touche!
Except that in both your examples there is a fairly applied mechanism in place for catching ANY offender. Its not a question of catching all, but rather fairness in application. There is no such mechanism in place for catching these Catholic sex rule violaters, except for the mistake of pregnancy. If there was some, any sort of system in place for checking for rule violations, like the drug testing & speed traps (in place for your examples), or perhaps searching a priests room routinely for condoms, child porn. etc. then I would agree with you. Because at least then there is a plan, a methodology for enforcing the rules. Even crimes have a methodology in place for finding evidence & solving them. But this, the only way a man can get "caught" would be, a) the girl snitches, b) the dude brags, c) the guy gets an STD - AND tells the principle, which would be real dumb, unless of course it was the principle he was sleeping with, in which case both no doubt would get away with it.
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