Do you believe that a faith-based grade school (wholly funded by a religion) is within their rights to fire a female teacher that is single and becomes pregnant?

Yes.

Hard to argue with it if it’s only religious people paying to run the school and they have strict guidelines upon hiring teachers that stipulate what rules must be followed in order to keep the job. If, as the article stated, pregnancy outside of marriage was a cause for firing someone, the teacher knew ahead of time what would be on the line. The only time I can see arguing against it is if the school was funded with taxpayer money.

^What she said.

Yes. In this case there was a contract that outlined the behavioral requirements for keeping the job.
As long as the contract she signed is enforced equally for men and women, there is no argument.
If the teacher can find an example of a man violating the principles of the contract and not being fired, then she may have a discrimination case’

In that case, the jury was instructed that even if an employee signed an employment contract containing a morality clause, that does not exempt that person’s employment from the protections of federal and state anti-discrimination laws. The jury was told that an employee cannot waive his rights to be free from unlawful discrimination. In the Ohio case, it was made clear that an employer, whether a religious institution or not, cannot require an employee to sign a contract giving up certain civil rights, which includes the right of a woman to bear children.

@ibstubro What’s your opinion on the matter? Or would you still prefer to wait a little longer until there’s been more discussion?

I just thought of something. I wonder if they’d have fired her if she became pregnant from rape and didn’t have an abortion.

Depends on the contractn

Rights, in this case, are governed by the teaching contract she signed.

Now is that correct? Moral? Justifiable? Not according to my code of ethics, but I’m not a religious fundamentalist.

I’m still lurking, @DrasticDreamer, But thanks.

@josie said it.

@elbanditoroso Not necessarily. The law trumps contracts. Each state differs in their employment laws.

Why isn’t the separation of church and state questioned here? It seems to work only in reverse. You can separate church from state, but not state from church.

Interesting point, @Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One. Any takers?

@Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One @snowberry I’m agnostic with atheist leanings, but that’s precisely why I said I can’t see a problem with it as long as there’s not any taxpayer money involved, or, as @josie pointed out, males are fired for the same reason. If there was a contract with that stipulation and she was well aware of it, she, in my opinion, has nothing to sue over.

The law of the land trumps religion. Religion is often protected by the law, but there are lines that are drawn.

@Apparently_Im_The_Grumpy_One
In this case, to me at least, separation of church and state means that the state should not give privileges to religions to be exempt from the law, in this case, anti-discrimination laws.
Do you think a tribal religion should be able to be exempted from laws against killing people, so that they can perform their religiously mandated human sacrifices?

I dunno how it works in the US but in most EU countries you cannot waive away rights, so no.

She has a right not to be fired because of maternity, and not to be fired for religious reasons (i.e. discrimination), regardless of her employment contract which would also be an unlawful contract based on the previous assumption.

Suppose a company had its employees sign a contract allowing the company to throw virgins into a volcano. That would clearly be a violation of law, regardless of whether it applied equally to men and women. State law trumps religious law. Our view of morality has changed considerably in the last 400 years. Biblical law is outdated. Unlike the Bible, we have decided that slavery is wrong, that women are not the property of their husbands and that gay people should not be stoned to death.

I don’t think you could come up with sillier and more outrageous examples.

There have been religions in the past that sacrificed virgins by throwing them into volcanoes. Are you saying that they were wrong? What about slavery? The Bible is perfectly fine with it. There is a passage in the Bible that says it is okay to knock slaves unconscious provided they snap out of it in a few days. Where do you draw the line between what religion says is okay and what the State says is okay?

I, personally, am in complete agreement with @DrasticDreamer.
I don’t have a problem with a religious school upholding the outward appearances of their religion. The should not have to try to explain to grade school children why “Miss Smith” has a baby. Many contracts contain a morality clause and if you accept a contract with a narrow definition of morality, you should abide by it of accept the consequence.

This type of thing nullifies the very notion of a contract or agreement. This is why people don’t read them. They find a way to get what they want regardless of what they promised. I don’t find that this is discrimination at all. She signed it. Bureaucratic nonsense.

This is also the reason there is so much fine print in a contract. You can’t just have one that says “I promise to pay you $100 by april 15th, 2016” anymore. It has to have 28 pages of stipulations and catch all legal terminology.

I kinda threw out the “church and state” question just to see what you guys thought. Honestly I don’t think religion needs to be brought into it at all. It’s about the employer and the employee.. and the agreement they made resulting in money leaving the hands of the employer and going to the employee. That agreement was violated. Goodbye employee.

We have to separate two questions: (1) is this within the school’s rights, and (2) should this be within the school’s rights. There can be a lot of debate over (2), and anyone who says something like “I don’t see how…” or “I feel that…” is probably answering that question whether they mean to be or not. But if we are trying to answer (1), then what @ibstubro has posted is most relevant.

According to the law as it actually is, certain rights cannot be signed away. Therefore, any contract that involves the relinquishing of such rights is null and void (or at least those parts of the contract are null and void). Since US law does not allow one to give up reproductive autonomy (nor one’s freedom of religion) via contract, the school is violating this woman’s civil rights under the law as written.

This is something that religious institutions have struggled with in the past. They have operated under the assumption that their freedom of religion allows them to enforce their doctrines within privately funded institutions. But the courts have consistently found that this would be to violate the freedom of religion of their employees (who cannot be required to adhere to the same interpretation of the institution’s religion as their bosses).

Should it be that way? You all can have at it on that one. But with regard to question (1), the law has been surprisingly clear and consistent. (Note that there are plenty of ways to get around this, and many organizations have figured them out. But since the school has already stated its reason for firing this teacher, it’s a bit too late for one of these workarounds to be invoked.)

To clarify, I’m fine with her being fired over this, as I said in my first answer. The Catholic Church doesn’t approve of unwed marriage, they don’t approve of IVF. I don’t know where they stand in AI, but if they are against all three there is absolutely no room for a pregnant single woman to be an example for children, unless, God forbid, her husband had died during her pregnancy, or some similar extreme.

I just was saying in a later answer that some things are not protected under religious freedom, like stoning your wife for example. All Christians who tend to freak out when I say law trumps religion, then get quiet when talking about things like murder under Sharia law.

Not if it was a divine conception.

@talljasperman GA for making me laugh.

If federal laws in this case outweigh everything else, that’s the way it is. However, as @SavoirFaire pointed out, the argument then boils down to whether or not this should be the case.

I think it’s kind of dumb that she signed the contract knowing full well what it said regarding the matter. If she doesn’t hold the same views, why work there to begin with?

There are grey areas, though. If it was accidental pregnancy that occurred even while taking birth control (which I know a lot of Catholics are also against, but I seriously doubt they could work a clause about that into a contract), the woman couldn’t exactly get an abortion without being fired, either. Which, again, good luck writing some kind of clause to figure out if that’s happened into a contract. Or like I mentioned at some point above, if it was a pregnancy due to rape. What then? They fire her if she keeps the baby because they don’t believe in abortion, even though in that case the pregnancy would have been completely our of her control?

So I guess what it boils down to is that no one can ask her – or really even should be able to ask her – how she got pregnant. Because in cases of rape, especially, she’d be damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. Which is probably one reason federal law trumps all else. That said, I still maintain that if she intentionally got pregnant while out of wedlock, knowing what the contract stipulated, it was a stupid move on her part to sue them. But we’ll never know the details surrounding her pregnancy and I absolutely wouldn’t say that they should be able to fire her if it was due to rape.

I’m late to this debate but I agree with those who said the contract can’t supercede the law, so if the law says she keeps her job, she keeps her job.