Posted on 04/11/2012 9:44:41 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
ROCKWALL — Cathy Samford, a volleyball coach and science teacher, was fired from Heritage Christian Academy for getting pregnant and not being married, the school acknowledged.
"I looked it up and thought, 'They can't do this,'" said Samford, 29.
For almost three years, she coached volleyball at the private school. Samford was named "Coach of the Year" and recently began teaching science.
But when she got pregnant last fall, the school fired her because she was not married.
"We all have different views and interpretations," Samford said. "It's not necessarily the Christian thing to do to throw somebody aside because of those."
"You can't discriminate against someone who's pregnant or has a pregnancy-related medical condition," said Colin Walsh, her attorney. "That is both state and federal law."
But Heritage Christian said this case is not so simple.
"I understand some people that would say 'It's a heartless thing to do,'" said the school's headmaster, Dr. Ron Taylor. "It wasn't easy to do."
Taylor acknowledged that Samford could not get fired for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a public school. But HCA is a private, religious campus, and Taylor said the school considers teachers to be ministers, since they're allowed to share their beliefs in the classroom.
"The Supreme Court, as a matter of fact in the last month, has ruled 9-to-0 that a Christian school does have that right, because this is a ministry, so we have the right to have standards of conduct," Taylor added.
Taylor said Samford violated the morals clause in her contract and was not a "Christian role model" to her students.
"How's it going to look to a little fourth grade girl that sees she's pregnant and she's not married?" Taylor asked.
Mediation did not result in a resolution between the two parties. The school said it also refused to settle the case.
Taylor said HCA was contacted by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding the firing.
Samford and Walsh said they're now considering legal action. The fired teacher and expectant mother said she did nothing wrong, and faces financial problems now, including giving birth without insurance.
“She should be on her knees”
Yea. Just think of all the trouble she would have avoided.
Well, as Pat Dye said “hindsight is 50/50.
This has everything to do but with enforcing a contract. Nobody forced her to sign the contract with her employer and nobody forced her to violate that contract by willingly getting pregnant (I am assuming the pregnancy was not due to a rape).
So, she should suck it up and not complain. If she can’t afford insurance or pregnancy related expenses, then she can always give up the baby for adoption. Next time she will realize what not to get when she can’t afford to.
1) A quick check of my posting history will expose me as a flaming liberal as well as an avowed atheist—Not!
2) I believe we should deal with this type of thing with love and humility, knowing that we ourselves are no less a sinner in the eyes of God than anyone else.
1Jo 1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.
1Jo 3:11 For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another;
I’m not saying this was an easy situation for the school to handle. I just think I would have handled it differently.
I hear you! And to think Arkansas actually firing their popular coach violating a morality clause.
If she signed a contract to work there then I’m sure there is something in there about this/if that is the case she does not have a leg to stand on.
On the OTHER hand, I taught school for many years and stood up for what was right and was called the “Best damned Spanish teacher I’ve ever seen.”, but still wasn’t wanted BECAUSE I stood for what was right and set standards of excellence at every level. Go figure. Doing better now that I’ve escaped from Alca-public education. Now, since I was in the public school system, maybe I should have fathered some children out of wedlock. Probably would have gotten more support. :D
Absolutely not! But that is not what happened here.
or else that person will go on to have an abortion.
My concern is that to save $40,000 (or whatever her pay is) a year and that knowing that if word got out that she was pregnant that she was lose her job, that she'd take the easy way out of legal murder to save that money. It would be done, and the only ones to know would be the select few she would know about.
>>>What does the Bible say to do under these circumstances?<<<
5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife! 2 And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. 3 For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. 4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, 5 deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. 8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. 10 Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.
12 For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? 13 But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.” - 1 Corinthians 5:1-12
You mean it isn't caused by storks? That's what I was told as a kid.......
Back in my younger days I knew a couple of them.
The world already has the perfect society where everyone suspected of being a sinner is killed - Iran! They’ve got biblical morality perfected and they have even added to it. On the other hand, Christ established his church for and among sinners - I don’t think the followers of pure works righteousness would want to have anything to do with that.
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She violated the contract, she gets to be fired. In the early part of the 20th century even public school teachers were expected to be moral role models and could get fired for things that seem insignificant today. People then understood that children which includes teenagers are very influenced by immorality in teachers and other adults they interact with. It's simple natural law.
You are absolutely correct. All the whiners on this thread can go break their contracts and see if they get fired or not.
And children will know that Teacher screwed around without being married and everyone is fine with it. So they will assume they can do the same.
Not a word in this piece about the baby’s father. Where is he?
I’d say give them an opportunity to marry. No marriage, or a flighty bum of a father and she’s fired. Her choice. That seems simple enough.
More info from another source:
She and her fiance had been planning to get married at the end of the summer, but a series of events had delayed the wedding.
Samford said she never dreamed she would be fired for her pregnancy and went into her conversations with the school thinking their biggest concern would be her missing part of the basketball season since she was supposed to coach.
When she was told she was being terminated, Samford was “totally shocked.”
“I didn’t think I would lose my job,” Samford said. “I was in shock and devastated and that’s when I said, ‘If this is the problem, I’m willing, and so is my fiancé, to go ahead and get married. That wasn’t the issue. We were going to get married regardless.”
The school denied her offer.
“It’s not that she’s pregnant. The issue here is being an unmarried mother,” Taylor said. “Everything that we stand for says that we want our teachers, who we consider to be in the ministry, to model what a Christian man or woman should be.”
Samford, who has two children from a previous marriage, maintains that she did not violate her contract in any way and that the contract’s clauses about being a “Christian role model” are vague.
She could marry any man who was willing to be a parent for the baby. He would not necessarily need to be the biological father of the baby.
Exactly - it's a contract thing, not a Christian thing.
As for challenges to contractual authority, then you get into the nasty grounds of limiting a free person's right to contract. So you have to bring in arguments concerning denial of that freedom, like (usually) fraud, or coercion, or limited comprehension, etc.
Of course, at the very bottom you have Muslims, who use freedom of religion to justify contracts that can be used to commit murder and slavery, but then that same religion denies the authority and process of the contractual legal system it is exploiting. So its continued existence is a political issue, not a legal one - it has no legal grounds to exist.
see post 97.
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