Posted on 07/08/2020 8:04:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Supreme Court has ruled that two Catholic schools were within their rights to dismiss two teachers on the basis of classifying them as “ministers” rather than secular professionals.
In a decision released Wednesday morning, the high court ruled 7-2 that two California-based Catholic schools can classify their teachers as ministers and not be held by the standards of state antidiscrimination laws.
Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion of the court, being joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
Alito cited the 2012 Supreme Court decision Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, in which the court ruled unanimously that antidiscrimination laws do not apply to religious employment decisions.
“The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission,” wrote Alito.
“Judicial review of the way in which religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissenting opinion, being joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in which she argued that the decision “strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections.”
“… the Court’s apparent deference here threatens to make nearly anyone whom the schools might hire ‘ministers’ unprotected from discrimination in the hiring process,” wrote Sotomayor.
Agnes Deirdre Morrissey-Berru sued Our Lady of Guadalupe School of Hermosa Beach under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, claiming age discrimination.
Our Lady of Guadalupe argued that Morrissey-Berru was let go due to poor performance and because of a new rating system implemented that featured the teachers becoming catechists.
Although a district court ruled in favor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a three judge panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the ruling in April of last year.
The panel concluded that as a teacher, Morrissey-Berru held a position that was too secular to warrant a ministerial exemption and thus her claim of age discrimination remained valid.
“Aside from taking a single course on the history of the Catholic church, Morrissey-Berru did not have any religious credential, training, or ministerial background. Morrissey-Berru also did not hold herself out to the public as a religious leader or minister,” concluded the Ninth Circuit panel.
“Morrissey-Berru did have significant religious responsibilities as a teacher at the School … However, an employee’s duties alone are not dispositive under Hosanna-Tabor’s framework.”
In the other case, Kristen Biel sued St. James School of Torrance over not renewing her contract, allegedly because she had cancer, which violated the Americans With Disabilities Act.
St. James School responded Biel was released because of poor performance and that the decision was made before Biel disclosed her cancer diagnosis to the school.
In December 2018, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 that Biel was not a minister according to the standards set out by Hosanna-Tabor and thus could sue the school.
“There was no religious component to her liberal studies degree or teaching credential. St. James had no religious requirements for her position,” concluded the panel majority.
“Nor did St. James hold Biel out as a minister by suggesting to its community that she had special expertise in Church doctrine, values, or pedagogy beyond that of any practicing Catholic.”
The two cases were consolidated and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in May, with the religious liberty law firm Becket representing the Christian schools.
“Our view was the court really seemed quite broadly in agreement that the schools should win their case and that the 9th Circuit was wrong,” Becket Senior Counsel Daniel Blomberg, a member of the legal team representing the schools, told The Christian Post at the time.
“I think the thing that the justices were probing was less about this particular case but more about how to draw the line doctrinally in future cases. I think that’s one of the things that came through really clear was that the line being drawn by opposing counsel wasn’t the right one.”
Major decision with regard to Churches being able to keep the LBGT crowd out of their churches and schools.
Sotomayor and Ginsburg are pure politicians. This should not have even been a question.
7-2....not bad......................
Bye bye homosexuals that lied to get hired by Catholic schools. The court says you can be fired and you will be. The crush of students whose parents are trying to protect them from government school indoctrination now makes this an employers market. Schools that don’t “get it” will be collapsed overnight.
They need to sign up to teach in Muslim schools!
Pissant, though, compared to the elephant of the Civil Rights Act redefinition to include trannies and gays.
Praise God! Not Catholic myself, but common sense tells you that if you’re teaching in a private Christian school, you’re ministering the Word of God, one way or another, while you teach. And a church has the right to teach according to it’s doctrine, and expect its teachers to know and pass on said doctrine.
Excellent....They’re starting to lean to the fact that the Law of the Churches and their beliefs are NOT subject to the civil laws. Church members, however, not exempt from “ordinary” Civil Laws.
Winning!
Had there been 4 others on the liberal side, Roberts would have been the fifth there. He seems to vote conservative only when his vote doesn’t matter.
You noticed...................
I cannot understand why any rational and honest person who honestly loves their own freedoms - whether they are a religious person or not - sees anything wrong with a religious institution having religious standards for its employees, all its employees.
Freedom is not a demand that ANY private outfit has to accept you.
Freedom is about what THE GOVERNMENT cannot do.
A private institution is not the government and its private associations are made in the course of private individuals (employers and employees) agreeing to associate, or not.
No one compels by law, by force of government, that they can, or they must work for any outfit. And if an agreement to work for a private outfit is made, that includes the rules the private outfit has.
Someone unhappy with those rules is not compelled by government to keep their job under rules they don’t like, and neither should the employer be compelled to keep an employee by accommodating their rules to please the employee.
Since the 1960s the entire set of ideas about our freedoms has been turned upside down, from a position of defining powers the government does not have (cannot deny freedom of speech) to powers the government does have against our freedoms (”hate speech”, forced acceptance for helping make abortion available, forced work to produce things contrary to your religious beliefs [gay weddings], and many other examples).
The idea of “freedom” has denigrated to “politically correct outcomes” as expressions of “freedom” but the freedoms of those who oppose those outcomes are taken away. The constitutional freedoms have lost their universal nature and are now handed out or denied by political preferences.
All we need are vouchers for private schools, and the entire secular education apparatus can be dismantled by sending kids to religious private schools with tax dollars.
maybe we can establish or re-establish some old timey good Catholic schools as in my youth...prayer, dress code,pledge of allegiance, etc....
A coworker that rock-climbs was asked by his fellow rock-climbers to be the minister at their wedding, since he was and ordained priest on line. He showed us wonderful pictures of the wedding at a humanly in-accessible peak that only they could rock climb. Beautiful.
So out of curiosity I went to the website he mentioned and saw the button for ‘click to be ordained’. I clicked it, thinking it would lead to another page asking for money or other contribution.
But no.. it came up as ‘Congratulations! you are now ordained in the church of something or other’.
So now, I am officially a priest.
Does that mean that if I hire someone I can call them ministers? /s
You don’t have to call them ministers nor do they need to be ministers under this ruling. They need merely to have a ministerial function and the church gets to decide who has a ministerial function. A sweeping victory.
Their dissents in this and the Little Sisters of the Poor cases imply that women have no choice whatsoever but to apply for jobs that will restrict their liberal behavior—like they are somehow compelled to select Catholic employment—and that expecting them to remain Catholic in their behavior as a term of employment is somehow an outrage against all women in the entire US workforce. So glad theirs were the minority opinions.
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