Posted on 10/22/2015 9:19:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
Earlier this year, the Catholic Diocese of Richmond fired the executive director of an associated charity known as the Saint Francis Home after the man disclosed he was in a same-sex marriage. The executive director subsequently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming sexual orientation discrimination. While such EEOC complaints (and federal lawsuits) have been filed before, only this past summer did the EEOC rule in Baldwin v. Foxx that sexual orientation discrimination could constitute sex discrimination which is prohibited by Title VII. Despite its jumbled logic, this ruling increases the likelihood that the executive director’s claim against the Richmond Diocese will find traction with the EEOC.
Unlike the employer in Foxx, however, the Richmond Diocese and its charity home are religious institutions. They therefore fall within the protection of Section 702(a), which exempts religious organizations from the rest of Title VII as long as their employment decisions are decided on the question of whether the employee belongs to the employer’s particular religion.
But will the diocese’s actions here be construed as religious-based hiring permitted by Section 702(a), or impermissible sexual orientation discrimination for which Section 702(a) offers the Richmond Diocese no protection? What exactly does Section 702(a) mean when it refers to employees being of a particular religion, and who gets to make this determination?
The EEOC would like us to think it is merely enforcing nondiscrimination law in cases like this, but if one’s religion includes views on marriage and sexuality that the government deems “discriminatory,” isn’t the government effectively determining the tenets of a particular religion? In this case, wouldn’t the EEOC be determining what it means to be a Catholic?
While an executive director position may not fall within the ambit of Hosanna-Tabor and the ministerial exception, a determination by the EEOC of what constitutes a particular religion would be barred by the religion clauses of the First Amendment and the church autonomy doctrine, which prohibits the government from meddling in internal church decision-making.
The government would likely respond to these arguments by claiming it is just enforcing nondiscrimination requirements and that churches are otherwise free to act as they wish. But if the government can sidestep a religious organization’s own understanding of what constitutes belonging to its particular religion by citing enforcement of nondiscrimination requirements, the particular religion determination will become so cramped as to make the Section 702(a) exemption meaningless.
When the government’s demands—no matter how characterized and framed—interfere with and trump private religious organizations’ and churches’ ability to determine their own particular religious beliefs, do we not have a government at once interfering with individual freedom and establishing a religion of its own?
Why would we want such an intrusive government?
I can’t see how we would—except if we now believe the government should be the arbiter deciding who is a proper Catholic (or proper member of anyfaith). If that’s the world we are living in, God help us.
This is a question every American should be asking - daily.
They’re looking for God without bothering to go looking for a real one.
Mr. Trump? Mr. Cruz? You listening?
And that is the point.
Of COURSE this is going to happen. Why wouldn’t it, when justice has already been kicked to the curb by the leftist barbarians?
Pelosi and Biden decided that Catholics are Catholics in name only a long time ago. As long as they vote democrat.
And that their federal government MUST demand every other Catholic accept Pelosi and Biden’s definition IMMEDIATELY.
This is the mess that was created when the courts ignored private property and freedom of association rights in the civil rights era. A private business owner should have the right to hire or fire anyone at any time for any reason. The constitution was only meant to restrain government—not the rights of individuals.
Does this mean that some people might be offended when they are denied a job? Perhaps, but that is much better than the currently litigious society of constantly competing civil liberties and arbitrary rulings.
Back when the US Constitution was mostly enforced as written, this would have been a no-brainer. There is no constitutional right to be employed.
It used to be that faiths were honored enough in general to avoid unseemly uses like this. Faiths that held a less widely held tenet might be in for more scrutiny, but widespread mores were robustly honored.
This situation has changed with the new “sexual orientation” stuff. Widely rejected across many faiths, now it is getting stuffed down everyone’s throat for the sake of the new abstraction that has gotten itself defined to be legal marriage. Surely the tail is now wagging the dog, if it ever had been.
It is to be hoped and prayed that enough of America finds this quintessentially unacceptable enough that it chooses to lift up God once more. “We are all Catholics now.”
If the libs had their way, the new 1st Amendment would read:
“You can believe in God, just as long as your version of God only promotes liberalism”
Gays began campaigning for "gay marriage" </cant> as long ago as 1990, or 10 years after their first attack on sodomy statutes in the 80s and 10 years before the James Dale Boy Scout case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The timing shows the relative value-ranking of these cases by the homosexual movement's legal organizations, which had 600 gay attorneys volunteering for them in 2001, per an interview with Evan Wolfson of Lambda Legal in an interview with 365gay.com in the aftermath of the James Dale ruling by SCOTUS.
It's interesting to note that the Hawaiian Baehr vs. Lewin case was not taken up by Lambda when filed, in 1990, because at that time Lambda's groupthink didn't credit the institution of marriage as being worth the fight. Wolfson's later 365gay.com interview shows how much Lambda's opinion of the importance of "=" sloganeering had improved 11 years later.
Point being, (absent Lambda at first) it's always been about demolishing marriage because marriage is heteronormal: it shows us what "normal" is, and it shows in high relief how perverse are the positions homofacilitators have taken w/ regard to sexual mores and institutions.
The difference between 1990 and 2001 was the evolution among the gay literati of "antimarriage", in which people like Michelangelo Signorile and Andrew Sullivan advanced the idea that the way to nullify marriage's normalizing power is to ape it, co-opt it, and then destroy it with an intellectually and morally incompatible folkway. Which is what gays are busy doing now.
People have planned any number of looney things since the start of world history. To plan something doesn’t mean to get it to happen.
The question we should ask is why did it get such legs. People you would not dream should support it, do, at the drop of a hat.
Some have said because it was not diligently and harshly punished, but I think it goes to deeper issues about love which if not addressed would make it impossible to even sneeze at the problem, let alone stone it away. I posit that long before homosexuals made marriage and family a mockery on a widespread basis, heterosexuals were doing it. We now have the equivalent of the coup de disgrace.
I.e. if one won’t stand up for the thing worth protecting, choosing to focus on one mode of attack, and a latecomer to the effectual scene at that, kind of makes one look like a hypocrite. I say that hopefully not without hostility but as a means of offering potential insight about what to do.
I mean not WITH hostility (double negatives are tricky)
Asking the question isn’t enough. Doing something useful is the key. Obviously electoral politics doesn’t qualify.
just wondering how long this guy had been in that job? Could he have been an activist infiltrator?
Why does the left so often get away with ignoring the First Amendment?
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