Baptists Find Neat Loophole To Fire Janitors Who Do Gay Stuff

Reverend Receptionist


Baptists Find Neat Loophole To Fire Janitors Who Do Gay Stuff



There’s a certain kind of rightwing creativity that comes into play when government tries to make bigots not behave like complete bigots to everyone, like when cities all over Virginia just shut down their school systems rather than integrate, or more recently, when several counties in Florida announced that they just won’t marry anyone at their courthouses, straight or gay, so it’s equal, all right? Well, they’re at it again. The Southern Baptists have written a manual explaining to churches how they can get away with all the discriminating they want: just make everyone who works for you a minister, and then you can fire them without worrying about troublesome lawsuits!

You see, the Southern Baptist Convention simply wants to be free of the tyranny of “cultural harassment, intimidation, and even legal punishment for those whose consciences are held captive to the Scripture’s teaching on God’s purpose for marriage and sexuality,” in the words of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore. So to protect churches from burdensome antidiscrimination laws that say you can’t fire someone just for being gay, the SBC and the anti-gay legal eagles of the Alliance Defending Freedom (every day is Backwards Day for fundamentalist bigots) have collaborated on a handy manual called Protecting Your Ministry From Sexual Orientation / Gender Identity Lawsuits, available as a free download. It’s just packed with good advice about having formal membership policies and admissions procedures for church schools that will screen out the Wrong Sort of Parents (who do it in the butt), so as to “interrupt or terminate the admissions process if the school receives an application evidencing a lifestyle or belief system inconsistent with the school’s religious beliefs or mission.”

The genius recommendation to make everybody a minister relies on a very selective reading of the 2012 Supreme Court decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC, which held that a church was free to fire a teacher with disabilities because she also had some ministerial duties, creating a carve-out from annoying distractions like the Americans with Disabilities Act and other civil rights laws. If the First Amendment really guarantees religious freedom, then churches need to be free to make whatever shitty hiring decisions they want when it comes to their ministers, and since the teacher did also do some ministerial work, she couldn’t sue for discrimination.

So Protecting Your Ministry seizes on the Hosanna-Tabor decision and urges churches to assign some “ministerial duties” to every employee possible, from receptionists to groundskeepers to janitors: Very clever! Require the church’s accountant to conduct an occasional Sunday School class on why the parable of the Talents justifies getting rich in the stock market, and WAH-LAH!, she’s now the Right Reverend Beancounter. As Think Progress explains, once this job-title Transubstantiation has taken place, “the janitor is now a ‘minister’ and the employer is free to fire that janitor because they are black, because they are gay, or because they are a woman.” But mostly because they’re gay, because most churches have resigned themselves to the inconvenient fact that blacks and women aren’t going away any time soon.

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