Contractual Obligations

It's good to see this Cincinnati story about the Archdiocese forcing all Catholic school employees to sign a morality clause that censors their opinions finally going national, mainly because in Ohio, taxpayer vouchers can be used to pay for Catholic schools, and yet the Archdiocese remains exempt from basic workplace protections.

First-grade teacher Molly Shumate and high school English teacher Robert Hague are among the veteran teachers choosing to leave the diocese over a ‘morality clause’ included in the new contracts. The clause reportedly prohibits teachers, whether Catholic or not, from having sex or living with a partner outside of marriage, using in-vitro fertilization, leading a gay “lifestyle,” or publicly supporting any of the above.

Steve Benen sums this up:

That last part is of particular interest. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese wrote the “morality clause” in such a way as to apply not just to employees’ actions, but also their stated opinions.

In other words, if you work at a Catholic school in Cincinnati, you can’t be gay or try to have children through IVF treatments, and at the same time, you also can’t say you support gay rights or endorse IVF treatments in general.

And yet Ohio, like a number of other states, allows taxpayer money to go to private religious schools while they remain exempt from state employment laws.

One of those two things has to change.  Oh, and by the way, this is the real First Amendment issue with religious institutions.