Saturday 26 January 2013

Catholic Church Admits You Can Sack Teachers For The Beliefs They Hold

Opponents of LGBT liberty love to try to scare off the general population from allowing greater freedom due to the fear that it might lead to teachers being sacked. Given teachers aren't usually flavour of the month (just look at all the moaning from media talking heads over teachers getting the day off during school closures due to the snow) it seems an unusual strategy but they use it anyway. It is a position Catholic spokespeople advance quite often.

I've pointed out the hypocrisy of this stance before. But now the Catholic Church has only gone and given us even more evidence of their hypocrisy. So you mustn't sack someone if they disagree with marriage equality but Catholic run schools can sack people for doing all sorts of things they don't like (and that isn't just for doing them in the classroom). The National Secular Society reports on this and quotes The Tablet as saying:
"Under the heading of "substantive life choices", Mgr Stock includes marriage in a non-Catholic church or register office without canonical dispensation, remarriage after divorce and "maintaining a partnership of intimacy with another person, outside a form of marriage approved by the Church and which would, at least in the public forum, carry the presumption from their public behaviour of this being a non-chaste relationship".  
This also applies to all staff in a Catholic school." Other "substantive life choices" he rules unacceptable include "maintaining the publication or distribution of, or by any other means of social communication or technology, material content which is contrary to gospel values".
"Contrary to gospel values" as defined by the Catholic church I suspect. Freedom of belief for Catholics only appears to be the official policy of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

1 comment:

Richard T said...

Presumably if using contraception comes under this proscription then the catholics won't have many teachers left.