You Will Be Made to Care. Fired Gay Catholic Teacher Edition

Image by Mike Licht vis Flickr Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/

Image by Mike Licht vis Flickr Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/

 

The facts in this case are banal and straightforward (or gayforward, if you wish).

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A first grade teacher named Jocelyn Morffi at the Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School in the Archdiocese of Miami returned from her wedding to find she had been sacked. Why? Because she married another woman.

“This weekend I married the love of my life and unfortunately I was terminated from my job as a result,” Morffi said in a post on social media. “In their eyes I’m not the right kind of Catholic for my choice in partner.”

She’s right in a way, if “no kind of Catholic” is the same as “right kind of Catholic.”

Despite the ongoing carnival of heresy that masquerades for the Catholic Church in Western Europe, the Church’s timeless teaching is that marriage only exists as prescribed by Jesus Christ: one man, one woman, for life. Even within the increasingly muddled statements of Pope Francis, there is no place for same-sex marriage and there is no place in the Church for homosexual activity:

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

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This same view of chastity, by the way, is expected of unmarried heterosexual couples.

What is more, after buggery was made a sacrament by the Florida Supreme Court, the Archdiocese notified every employee that just because it was legal didn’t mean they could do it:

After judges in Florida lifted the state’s ban on same-sex marriage this week, thousands of employees in Miami’s Catholic Archdiocese got a memo from their boss, Archbishop Thomas Wenski, that read as a warning: watch what you do or say, even after work or on social media, or you might lose your job.

Wenski’s note, after a brief reference to court decisions that he said “imposed the redefinition of marriage,” merely quoted from the employee handbook as a reminder to Church workers of longstanding policy: Every archdiocese employee, Catholic or non-Catholic, from ministerial leader to school teacher and custodian, is considered a Church representative and is expected to abide by Catholic teaching, and any conduct “inconsistent” with that can draw disciplinary action, up to termination.

Attached was a longer, carefully drafted statement from the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops reiterating its opposition to same-sex marriage, which it called “disruptive” and a threat to religious liberty.

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The Diocese seems to be on pretty solid ground and the Supreme Court’s Hosanna Tabor decision would indicate that the firing of this teacher for deliberately violating Church doctrine would survive any legal challenge.

None of that stops this from being made a cause célèbre for the “bake that cake, now” movement.

A Miami Catholic school fired a lesbian teacher after she married her partner, drawing attention to a stalled gay-rights bill in the Florida Legislature and marking a new campaign issue in one of the nation’s most competitive Democratic congressional primaries.

“It’s 2018. But you may be surprised to learn that you can be fired from your employment not just because of gay marriage but also because you’re gay,” said state Rep. David Richardson, a Miami Beach Democrat who’s the first openly gay Florida House member and the top fundraiser in the crowded primary for Florida’s 27th Congressional District, where the school is located.

Richardson said the case underscores the need for federal legislation and the passage of FL HB347 (18R), which would ban Florida hotel owners and employers from discriminating against people due to their sexual orientation or gender. But, he said, the GOP-led Legislature has stifled the bill year after year. The legislation hasn’t been heard this year in committee, and, now that the 60-day legislative session is halfway over, there’s likely not enough time to pass it.

Because of the state’s refusal to pass the Competitive Florida Workforce Act, gay-rights advocates are pressuring Amazon to avoid building a headquarters in Miami as well as other cities in states without protections for LGBT people.

Miami-Dade County has a local ordinance that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, but there’s an exception for religious institutions, said Tony Lima, executive director of the advocacy group SAVE Dade.

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These people are not looking for tolerance, they are looking for worship and subservience. If they won’t accept that a religious school that is charged with the faith formation and catechesis of its students has a right to not accept as faculty people who are blatantly opposed to that faith, they won’t accept anything less than the supremacy of homosexual marriage over actual marriage.

As Erick Erickson has said so often, you don’t have the ability to not care about this because you will be made to care.

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