firing pregnant teachers from religious schools.

[Leslie Goldstein]

Husbands can leave (via divorce) without a wife's permission.  The only sin is
if she remarries, right?  I do not think non-publicizd marriages are such a
rarity.

"Scarberry, Mark" wrote:

>  The "secret marriage" theory is a bit of a reach. If a teacher came to
> school drunk the students would have no way of knowing whether the teacher
> had been the victim of a coffee house employee who secretly put vodka in his
> coffee. The boy scouts would have no way of knowing whether Dale was
> secretly an agent provocateur for an anti-gay group who wanted to create
> precedent favoring the right to discriminate.
>
> And most of the Christian schools that would fire a teacher for becoming
> pregnant out of wedlock also treat divorce in most cases as a sin. So the
> secret marriage and secret divorce theory, even if otherwise plausible,
> creates its own problem.
>
> Mark Scarberry
> Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leslie Goldstein
> To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
> Sent: 8/19/01 5:36 AM
> Subject: Re: firing pregnant teachers from religious schools.
>
> the children, contrary to Bernstein's assertion would have no way to
> know that the pregnant teacher is not secretly married, or was not
> secretly marred at the time of impregnation, later to get divorced.
> LFG
>
> David Bernstein wrote:
>
> The counter-factual discrimination question, would you have treated this
> the
> same way if another group was involved, has arisen in several cases
> involving
> private Christian schools that fired teachers who became pregnant out of
>
> wedlock.  In all four cases I have seen, the courts denied summary
> judgment
> to the schools, despite their claims that (1) adherence to Christian
> doctrine
> was a BFOQ and (2) that the discrimination was based "on religion" and
> therefore exempt from Title VII when engaged in by a religious entity.
> On
> the secdon issue, courts held that the schools would need to prove to a
> jury
> that they would also have fired a man who had sex out of wedlock,
> otherwise
> the discrimination is based on gender, not religion.  The courts missed
> what
> I think is the obvious point that there is a difference between a man
> who had
> an affair that the school knows about but the children don't, and a
> woman who
> comes into school eight months pregnant.  Both individuals can be
> forgiven
> for their sins under Christian doctrine, but only one will be a public
> negative role model for children.  Also, the courts didn't consider
> exactly
> how one can prove a counter-factual.  What if no male teacher had
> actually
> been known to have an affair?  How could the school prove how it would
> have
> reacted under circumstances that never happened?
>
> These cases, I think, are taken care of by Dale, which should give
> churches
> the right to determine who is a proper role model.  But the issues
> raised by
> them suggest the difficulty in the line of argument "if it had been this
>
> other group involved, the defendant would have acted differently."