Unless she can show that other employees who were also known to have violated Catholic teaching were not fired... I'm not sure she has much of a case.

Please don't yell at me.

-- Katya

If one does not wish to be yelled at, perhaps it would be better if one were quite sure of the ground on which one were arguing?

From the website set up by the teacher in question (linked to from the Broadsheet post):

"it was widely known that other teachers on the premises had the same procedure done and it was common knowledge. As a matter of fact, there was one teacher who divulged to the entire staff at an in-service, that her child was conceived through in-vitro fertilization using donor sperm

and

" It is important to note here that one of the members of the board had in fact been a teacher at Xavier High School prior to his becoming a member of the board and has fathered twins through in-vitro fertilization while teaching at Xavier High School and he was not terminated from his teaching position.

Since it seems to me that this is pretty much what Katya was referring to, then maybe Katya would wish to reconsider her judgement?

Of course, this is completely ignoring the larger issue -- do you really wish to suggest that ANY imposition of conditions on employment, as long as it's agreed to in advance, is all right? What if the terms of employment include not getting sick in a way that might present the employer with significant insurance cost increases? What if they include voting certain ways, or endorsing certain political parties and stances? Are these powers we are comfortable granting to any and all employers? Or only the ones that are attached to religions? If the latter, which ones?

oooh, what do we have here? Could it be there’s a Conservatarian in our midst? My favorite blogsnack!

Come, lunchmeat; let us reason together.

No, I do not believe people are “too stupid or worthless to decide what’s good for them” – and said nothing to suggest that I do. Since you probably have the intelligence to realize this, then I have to assume you’re deliberately twisting my meaning. Very easy to defeat points that others never made, and that you so helpfully voice for them, isn’t it?

What I do believe is that there are large numbers of people who lack the market POWER to be able to hold out for what is “good for them” in employment options – numbers that grow daily larger under the anti-labor, anti-union, corporatist regulatory, tax, immigration, and trade policies of the current and recent administrations, and the globalizing trends of the last half-century.

What I do believe is that when someone doesn’t have a great deal of choice in employment options – perhaps because they have families that can’t just “vote with their feet” to another state, or attain, by next week, the specialized training necessary to compete for the better jobs that might be available – then they’re often going to settle for something that they realize isn’t very “good for them,” just to keep food on their families. (Or something like that; I seem to recall some highly respected person once put it that way.)

Now, I do have to ask – if you really think it just fine and dandy for employers to control such clearly non-task-pertinent matters as their employees’ manner of conceiving children, or their political beliefs, both of which you‘re clearly ok with, just where DO you draw the line – if anywhere? Is it at refusing to hire people who have genetic propensities to develop medical conditions? And is employing only people who look a certain way all right? What about giving jobs only to members of certain races? Genders? Hair color? If you’re really going to hold to such standards, won't you have the gumption to say so out loud?

And in re: my “arrogance.” Being that I am a practicing capitalist, creator of jobs and provider of valuable services in a Randian ideal such as Conservatarian types usually cream their jeans for (but perhaps that holds only if they parrot the ideology as well?), I do think I’ve earned a bit of positive self-regard along the way.

But if, in fact, you are the Conservatarian that I think you are, then your arrogance far exceeds whatever trivial heights mine can attain. To think, as Conservatarians do, that the options and opportunities available to them – the privileges and breaks that they just happened to get along the way by accident of birth – are, in fact, available to everyone… And thus that everyone is themselves, alone, fully and solely responsible for every twist in the paths their lives take... THAT, my friend, is arrogance of the highest order.

I hope you never have to discover the hard way that we are ALL in this together.