Catholic Schools Are Right to Use Morality Clauses, by Hudson Byblow

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By Hudson Byblow, Crisis Magazine, June 5, 2019

Hudson ByblowRecently, I have noticed an increasing amount of news reports challenging morality clauses in employment contracts for Catholic school teachers. While yet another example of a teacher breaking a morality clause popped up this spring, another one struck my eye in late 2018, a little closer to home. This latter one didn’t only challenge the moral clause of one school division, but rather the legitimacy of moral clauses altogether within the Canadian province of Alberta—encompassing several school districts. This, to me, was the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. In the States, where religious liberty is protected, churches (and religious organizations) can hire and fire whoever they want. But in Canada religious freedom is more precarious. Not only is there no equivalent to the First Amendment to protect speech, but also in Canadian (and some provincial) law, certain things connected to gender and identity are (or are becoming) enshrined as human rights. As a result, unless clarity on these topics is ramped up (and soon), it could be that these sexuality and gender rights may come to trump what we understand to be freedom of religion.

After reading about these cases (and noting who was supporting the idea that moral clauses should be axed), I began to wonder: If this push to overrule the rights of religious educational institutions caught enough momentum, where would it stop? And would it stop? With prominent Catholic personalities (including one well-known Jesuit) weighing in to seemingly support the abolition of those morality clauses (under the guise that they cause LGBTQ people to be “unjustly discriminated against”), that stopping point seems to be far off in the distance….Read entire article:  crisismagazine.com/2019/catholic-schools-are-right-to-use-morality-clauses