Court: Catholic school can’t fire teacher for violating morals clause

I guess it's an interesting time to be Catholic. You've got a new pope who has a lot of people excited, although the media thinks he's "obsessed with the devil." But at the same time, you've got the federal government forcing you to provide contraceptive services to employees in violation of your own moral teachings, and now you can't even require teachers in your schools to uphold those same moral teachings - even when they agreed to do so as a condition of employment.

Christa Dias, who taught computer science classes in two Cincinnati-area Catholic grade schools, was fired by the Cincinnati archdiocese after she became pregnant via artificial insemination. Dias is single, but the policy violation was not about out-of-wedlock sex - which she may or may not have been having. The Catholic Church teaches that artificial insemination is immoral. And it was in Dias's contract that she was not to avail herself of it. But a jury decided the contract didn't matter, as the Chicago Tribune reports:

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In 2010, the archdiocese fired Dias on the grounds that she had violated terms of a contract that she signed promising to adhere to Catholic morality, which it said barred the use of artificial insemination. Robert Klingler, the attorney for Dias, argued that the archdiocese fired her for being pregnant out of wedlock, which constituted a violation of federal law that bars employers from dismissing workers for being pregnant. "The jury decided that federal law trumps contract law," Klingler said. "You can't sign away your rights to be protected."

It's not as if the archdiocese had never fired an employee for being pregnant in violation of contract terms. They had, quite a few times, as a diocese spokesman pointed out. But they had never before been sued for doing so, probably because the teachers fired in the past knew perfectly well that they had signed a contract with terms, and figured the terms meant something. At another time in this nation's history, they would have, but now juries apparently feel free to disregard contract terms in find whatever they want to find. If the government is not going to enforce contracts, what exactly does a contract mean? To the extent you can see this as part of a larger societal attack on religion, here's how I would see it fitting in: Churches and institutions with which they associate have long had moral standards for those who want to work for them or serve in them. It has always been understood that if you don't want to adhere to such standards, you don't work for a church-affiliated institution that will hold you to them. Now, people feel free to take such jobs, agree to adhere to such standards - and then when they ultimately fail to do what they said they would do, they sue rather than face the consequences of their actions. And the legal system is apparently coming around to the view that anyone should be able to do whatever they want, regardless of what they agreed to. What can that lead to? Nothing good.