Friday, December 18, 2015

Mary Elizabeth Williams on Massachusetts Ruling Forbidding Catholic Schools to Discriminate: Icy Chill for Homophobes Hiding Behind Religion



Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon on the ruling handed down yesterday by Judge Douglas Wilkins in Massachusetts about Fontbonne Academy's rescinding of a contract to a married gay man: 


Did you just feel an icy chill, homophobes who think hiding behind your religion will protect your right to be discriminatory and hateful? It's called the wind of change, and it's going to get a lot stronger. A Massachusetts judge this week has ruled that a Milton all-girl Catholic prep school broke the law when it withdrew a job offer to a gay man. I suspect you'll be seeing a lot more of that from here on in, America. You might want to get used to it.

And then she concludes, 

Squicked out as certain segments of the population continue to be at the reality that not everyone in the world is hetero, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue with a straight face that a person's private life is somehow going to conflict with the moral obligations of, say, being a food services director, or that working with people means they're going "coerce" you into "compliance" with their legally recognized unions. And if you claim you're teaching kids to fight against discrimination while actually practicing it, I'm sure would Jesus would have quite the laugh over that one. As Bennett Klein explains, "Marriage equality has been the law of Massachusetts for over a decade and it is now the law of the land. But you can't have equality if you can get married on Saturday and fired on Monday."

The graphic (which I've used in the past, too, is from the Kurt Löwenstein Educational Center International Team by way of Wikimedia Commons.

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