Victory: School district to remove clause favoring non-Christian teachers

By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives March 21, 2014

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We (and a lot of other people, starting with Michigan Capitol Confidential) get results. The Ferndale Public Schools have quickly backed down and, with the full cooperation of their teachers' union, will remove language from their contract that gives preference to those "of the non-Christian faith" in hiring.

They really didn't have much choice. The language is blatantly illegal and unenforceable without doing a whole bunch of other things that are also illegal. After CapCon wrote a story highlighting the clause on Wednesday, we and a lot of others followed up with coverage on Thursday. Our piece generated more than 100,000 visits and it still going strong this morning. The coverage prompted State Rep. Tim Kelly (R-Saginaw) to contact the State Board of Education seeking an investigation, and that quickly got the attention of Ferndale school officials, who only a day before had refused to answer the questions posed by CapCon reporter Tom Gantert. As WDIV-TV reports, the prospect of a state investigation got the school district to move quickly. Even the teachers' union, the Ferndale Teachers Association, is on board with the change.

And as you might imagine, the public scrutiny also inspired quite the chorus of excuses. Claiming they had no idea it was there, or how it got there, district spokeswoman Shelley Rose said the language had been stuck in the contract at some point in the 1970s. Oh really? That's funny because the contract was signed in 2011. But let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she's claiming they just recycled old contract language. Let's take a look at the sentence in question:

Special consideration shall be given to women and/or minority defined as: Native American, Asian American, Latino, African American and those of the non-Christian faith.

When did people start using the terms Native American, Asian American and African American? Certainly not in the 1970s, when in these ethnic groups would have been referred to, respectively, as Indian, Oriental and Colored (or possibly Negro). If Ferndale was using the terms in this sentence in the 1970s, it was way, way, way ahead of the curve. I suppose it's possible that they updated the terms for more recent contracts, but if that's the case, then it means they read the sentence in question, which means they can't possibly claim they didn't know about the language favoring non-Christians. I'm glad they're changing the language, even if it's only because public exposure is living them with little choice, but it's not making things better when they lie about how and when it got there in the first place. By the way, thank you for all the excellent feedback to the commentary on my site yesterday about this. To those who challenged my position on whether Christians should fight against persecution, I offer further comment today along with a new update about the story itself.