The Glorious Atomicflea wrote:
gbaji wrote:
The problem as I see it is that in this case, the federal law preventing discrimantion (loss of job in this case) on the basis of sex or pregnancy is in direct violation of the Constitutional Right of religious practice.
Or the other way around. Time to roll those dice.
Hehe. Yeah. But, as I stated, a Constitutional Right generally superceeds a federal law. If we accept that premise that the parents who paid money to send their children to this school did so with the assumption that the were spending that money in order to have their children taught in an environment in keeping with their religious beliefs, then it's quite reasonable for that school to be able to enforce hiring/firing practices in keeping with that belief system.
There are other examples where practices that would normally be discriminatory are legal in situations where that discrimination is appropriate to that particular workplace. I think we got into a discussion about this a while ago when we were talking about the Wal-mart employment requirements thing. In that case, the issue was over whether or not a fitness requirement at Wal-Mart constituted age/sex discrimination. While there were lots of arguments for and against, the argument wasn't that such a thing is illegal in all cases, but only in cases where those requirements can't be shown to be relevant to the job for which the employee was hired. So, if you were hired to be a cashier, your employment should only be based on your ability to work a cash register and handle customers. It should not be based on whether or not you can lift a 100lb bag, or run the mile in under 8 minutes. However, if your job description *did* require those things, then it would be legal to hire/fire people based on their ability to meet those requirements.
If we are to accept the criteria stated in that thread, then does that not apply to this case? It would be discrimination to fire this woman from a post office job for example. But as a Catholic School teacher? One can easily argue that the requirements of her job do mean that she must act as a moral example to the students she's teaching, and so therefore being single and pregnant with no intention to marry is legitimate ground for termination.
I think it'll be an interesting case. I suspect though that it will be found that in this case, the job description does merit the discrimination. I'm sure there'll be some angry folks as a result though.
Heh. Just to toss out a side issue though. What if this was an openly gay teacher? Could they fire him/her? Would there be as much outcry if they did? Would there be more? What, if any, is the difference between those two cases?