Double Standard?

Interesting story in today's NY Post:

A pregnant and unmarried former pre-kindergarten teacher yesterday accused the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Queens elementary school where she worked of wrongfully firing her for having sex out of wedlock and choosing to keep her baby.

...McCusker and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission yesterday charging that the diocese and school broke a 27-year-old federal law banning pregnancy discrimination.

I have a hard time seeing a Yeshiva behaving any differently if they were presented with a similar situation.

William Donohue, president of the national Catholic League, takes the NYCLU to task for their hypocrisy in pursuing this case:

Donohue accused the NYCLU of hypocritically asking the government to step into a church matter after constantly battling any church involvement in government affairs.

"If they win, every rabbi or minister will have to listen to what state bureaucrats have to say about the running of religious schools," he said.

I would imagine that a religious institution has more leeway in requiring a teacher to follow rules of behavior than a public institution, but the NYCLU is using a claim of gender discrimination against the school.

Apparently, the school had always had a rule prohibiting premarital sex for its faculty members, but never enforced it. Only when the teacher announced her pregnancy did the school cite the rule.

But her lawyers argue that the school and church held McCusker to its policy of prohibiting sex outside marriage only after she became pregnant, thereby enforcing the policy in a way that disproportionately affects women and is illegal.

"The school used her pregnancy as a marker," said NYCLU lawyer Cassandra Stubbs. "How do they determine if male employees engage in premarital sex?"

Though I'm sure that there are people who will find this argument cogent, I think it's ridiculous. Yes, women are blessed with the ability to bear children, and thus bear a "marker" of premarital sex. But all her pregnancy is indicative of is that she wasn't careful about getting caught. I am quite sure that this school would show equal heavy-handedness if a male teacher were to show similar carelessness about getting caught having premarital sex, for example getting caught "in the act", as it were.

I also don't like the teacher's argument that:

"I don't understand how a religion that prides itself on being forgiving and on valuing life could terminate me because I'm pregnant and am choosing to have this baby," a sobbing McCusker said at a press conference at the NYCLU offices.

Yeah, being forgiving is a quality one might look for in a religious institution when one is a congregant. But as an employee, I am not as sure you can ask for such forgiveness. Don't religious institutions have a greater responsibilty to those who they are educating than to those they are employing? I believe they do.