POV: Why Catholic Schools Have the Right to Fire Married Gay Staff

The New York Times recently ran a front-page story about a Catholic school outside Seattle that fired an administrator who married another man. Just a week later, the front page of the Boston Globe featured a story about a Massachusetts Catholic school that canceled its job offer to a prospective food services director when it learned that he was in a same-sex marriage. Predictably, the tone of both accounts, and the great majority of those quoted, were sympathetic toward the victims of these decisions.

While I understand this instinctive reaction, I’d like to point out the implications of limiting the freedom of non–public schools to choose whom to employ. First, a word about my own background. After serving more than 20 years as the Massachusetts official responsible for enforcing the law against discrimination in schools, I became a professor at Boston University and was the University’s representative on the Governor’s Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth. Currently, I serve on the state advisory committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. I am not Catholic.

I am also vice president of the Geneva-based NGO OIDEL, which promotes educational freedom around the world. Experience with many countries has convinced me that we should be very careful about limiting the autonomy of non–public schools—and, indeed, of public schools, but that is another discussion—to preserve and express distinctive visions of the nature of a flourishing human life and how to promote it in children.

Educational freedom, both the freedom to provide education and the freedom to choose a school for one’s children, is protected as a basic human right by several international covenants, as well as by decisions of the US Supreme Court. These freedoms are interdependent: that of parents to choose is meaningless unless there are accessible schools with different approaches to education, and that of schools (and of educators) to create such distinctive approaches is frustrated if they must serve families whose children are assigned involuntarily, and thus must provide a lowest-common-denominator education that no one will object to.

If schools are not allowed to differ on the basis of different understandings of the Good Life, as faith-based schools and also many independent secular schools do, they will differ only on test scores, and parents with more resources will always find a way to get their children into schools with higher scores, either through moving to affluent areas or by paying tuition. A nationwide study found that because they offer a distinctive education, private schools in every region of the country were more racially integrated than residence-based public schools.

But schools, whether private or choice-based public schools like the charter schools that have been so successful in Boston, cannot maintain a clear focus on their distinctive educational mission unless free to select teachers who are wholeheartedly committed to that mission, be it Montessori, Catholic, Jewish, or a focus on the arts. Without a team of staff who agree on their shared mission and can work together on the basis of mutual trust, such schools of choice might as well pack it in.

The issue of the right of Catholic schools, specifically, to employ only teachers who in their teaching and lives (to the extent these are visible to students) do not undermine Catholic principles has been litigated in many countries. The principle on which that right has been upheld is often called “the duty of loyalty”: the freedom of the individual teacher to dissent must be considered in the context of the rights of other teachers who have chosen to work in a particular kind of school, and of parents who want such a school for their children.

In American cases, the courts have generally held that teachers in faith-based schools are similar to clergy in other religious institutions, and that there is thus a “ministerial exception” to the application of antidiscrimination laws. This applies to the suburban Seattle school: the vice-principal who was fired was in a leadership position and had willingly signed a contract promising to abide by Church teachings in order to be an example for students.

This does not apply in the same way, it seems to me, in the Massachusetts case, since a food service job (except in an Orthodox Jewish or Islamic school) could not reasonably be considered to involve upholding religious teachings.

Bottom line: Catholic and other faith-based schools should be applauded rather than condemned for ensuring that they and all of their staff present a message consistent with their beliefs. That is what integrity requires.

Charles Glenn (GRS’87) is a School of Education professor of educational leadership and policy. Among his numerous books is The American Model of State and School: An Historical Inquiry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies (New Forum Books, 2000). He can be reached at glennsed@bu.edu

http://jesus-is-savior.com/Great%20Men%20of%20God/pastor_roloff.htm

(Warning-if you google Brother Roloff, you will find numerous sites slandering this man and his ministry. I was at his Bethesda Home in Hattiesburg MS for a year, and not once did I ever receive abuse or see abuse. I did get “licks” a couple of times, which were exactly the same as the “licks” we received in public school, with a wooden paddle, while leaning on a chair. This was in the mid-Seventies. So if that was “abuse”, almost every public school in the US at that time was guilty of the same thing.)

“In 1969 Roloff Enterprises purchased 600 acres on Farm Road 665 near Cuddihy Field, south of downtown Corpus Christi, for its new headquarters. There Roloff established his People’s Baptist Church. Dormitories and a school were erected for the Rebekah Home, as were new facilities for the City of Refuge and Lighthouse ministries. The Jubilee Home was built for troubled women, age eighteen and above, and the Lighthouse, which continued to use the Intracoastal Canal buildings for fishing and camping, limited its ministry to young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The Anchor Home was begun for troubled boys under the age of eighteen, complete with a Christian school curriculum, a choir program, and vocational-training courses. At the same time the Peaceful Valley Home, a retirement community for Christian senior citizens, was opened near the Lighthouse facility at Mission. In all, over the next decade, Roloff Enterprises erected two rescue missions and eight homes for people of all age groups in need of help.

Roloff’s greatest battle began in 1971, when the Texas Department of Public Welfare (later the Texas Department of Human Servicesqv) sent him a letter demanding that the enterprises either have the Rebekah and Anchor homes licensed, which meant conforming to the department’s largely secular regulations, or close them down.

Roloff and his associates staunchly opposed the agency’s order, considering it a clear case of breach of church-state separation. The controversy resulted in charges of neglect and brutality, attacks by the Corpus Christi Caller-Timesqv and other Texas newspapers, weeks and months of counseling with attorneys, appearances in court, and numerous meetings with officials in Austin.

Through it all, Roloff and his supporters stood firm in his belief that “love never overrides conviction,” and many young lives continued to be salvaged through the Rebekah and Anchor Homes. Finally, Roloff reluctantly allowed the homes to be closed temporarily in October 1973, but on February 12, 1974, he allowed himself to be incarcerated for five days in the Nueces County Jail, where he had often preached to prisoners, in a successful move to reopen the homes. Finally, Roloff was granted a temporary reprieve in May, when the Texas Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

With the passage of the Texas Child Care and Licensing Act in 1975, however, the conflict surfaced anew. This legislative bill, which many believed had been aimed specifically at Roloff Enterprises, became law in January 1976. It stated that children under eighteen must be placed in child-care facilities licensed by the DHS. Roloff and his supporters again refused to back down, and despite favorable reports on the facilities by Attorney General John Hill and state welfare inspectors, the DHS served a restraining order in May 1976.

On June 21 Roloff again went to jail, again for five days, in an effort to keep the homes open. Then in October, the homes were again shut down and many of their residents taken by police to the Texas Youth Prison and other state juvenile facilities. But public support for Roloff Enterprises continued to grow, and the homes were opened throughout most of 1977 and 1978. On November 1, 1977, Roloff and his associates staged a patriotic rally in Dallas called “Save Our Nation,” which was attended by over 10,000 people, including 1,500 preachers. Acting on the advice of Hill and other attorneys, Roloff took his case to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the Texas law on October 2, 1978.

Again, the state ordered Roloff to shut down the homes unless he submitted to a DHS license in June 1979. Rather than allow the young residents to be taken to state facilities, Roloff had them sent to the ministry’s homes in Georgia and Mississippi. As part of that move, he and his supporters staged a protest rally on the grounds of the People’s Baptist Church, attended by many prominent evangelists and concerned laypeople from across the nation, including Vietnam veteran Clebe McClary. This event became known as the “Christian Alamo.” At that time Roloff Enterprises transferred ownership and operation of the homes and property to the People’s Church, a move that enabled the homes to be opened once more in September. Although state officials continued to harass Roloff, prompting court appearances in Corpus Christi, Laredo, and Austin, thousands of troubled youth were again ministered to in the Rebekah and Anchor Homes.”

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