Guest Post by Morbo
I’m sure the New York Civil Liberties Union meant well, but its attorneys have just filed an employment grievance they are almost certain to lose and that generates lousy publicity.
Here are the facts: Michelle McCusker is a 26-year-old woman who teaches at St. Rose of Lima school in Rockaway Beach, N.Y. She is pregnant and has no intention of marrying the baby’s father. The school just fired her.
Yes, the school officials are acting like jerks. Firing a pregnant woman is mean. But the simple fact of the matter is the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom gives church leaders the right to act like jerks.
“The school singled her out because she was pregnant, and the only way they could do that was because she was a woman,” said Cassandra Stubbs, an ACLU attorney. “How do they determine if male employees engage in premarital sex?”
My guess is they don’t. Of course it’s unfair, but religious schools have the right to act in an unfair manner. They are essentially arms of the churches that sponsor them. A church can fire an employee if it doesn’t like that person’s lifestyle choices, and so can a church school. They can dump you for being gay, getting an abortion, cohabitating, failing to go to services regularly and so on.
This right is absolute — unless tax funding enters the picture. Here’s where things get interesting.
To my mind, if private religious schools and other “faith-based” institutions start getting your money and mine, they have opened themselves up to regulation by the state.
At this point, the government should be able to come in and slap all kinds of regulations on these institutions, including requiring them to abide by all manner of local, state and federal anti-discrimination laws. This is more or less what happened in Ontario, where Catholic schools have been receiving tax funds for years. Gradually, government officials began imposing non-discrimination laws on the schools. Many teachers are now non-Catholics. Church officials don’t like it, but they’re also too addicted to government money to give it up.
Back in the U.S.A., this issue is playing out in the halls of Congress, where right-wing House members constantly argue that religious groups have a religious freedom right to take massive amounts of tax support yet still impose religious qualifications on employees.
Big, fat government checks with no strings attached? It sounds to good to be true — and it is. Religious institutions might get away with it for a few years. But in the long run, tax funds come with strings, and regulation to protect the public interest is inevitable. All it will take are a few cases like McCusker’s to sway public sympathy. Right now, most people see her case as somewhat frivolous since Catholic schools in New York do not get direct tax support. (I know, I know – they get a tax exemption. The courts have ruled that’s not direct support.) If the school received, say, half of its budget from the taxpayer, McCusker would have a much stronger case legally and would probably win more public sympathy.
The New York ACLU, I’m afraid, has jumped the gun on this one. Other Catholic schoolteachers fired for violating church doctrine have filed grievances and even lawsuits, but none to my knowledge has been successful.
If current trends persist and the nation continues lurching toward public funding of faith-based schools and social services, McCusker and all those like her may have a case someday. Alas, today they do not.