Events at an Ohio Catholic school put in sharp focus the warped priorities and morality of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. If you are a priest who molests and rapes children and youths, you can rely on a Vatican orchestrated conspiracy to protect you and maintain you on the payroll. And if you are a member of the high clergy and things get too hot with local police authorities, you can count on a plum position at the Vatican to keep you out of the clutches of the authorities (e.g., Cardinal Law who was whisked out of Boston to Rome). But if you are a gay teacher in a Catholic school and your secret is inadvertently leaked, you will be unemployed before you know what hits you. A piece in the New York Daily News looks at what happened to Carla Hale (pictured below), who was outed as a lesbian after her mother’s obituary listed her girlfriend as a survivor. Here are highlights:
An Ohio woman was fired from her job of 19 years at a Catholic high school after being outed as gay. But the Columbus, Ohio, community has rallied around Carla Hale, circulating a petition urging her reinstatement to Bishop Watterson High School.
“It’s amazing that they’ve come together and rallied around this situation,” Hale told the Columbus Dispatch. “I’m in awe of them.”
The physical education teacher took time off from school in February in the wake of her mother’s death. Her mother’s obituary mentioned Hale and her female partner as survivors, which attracted the attention of an “appalled” parent.
“If not for an obituary that appeared in the paper, none of this would be happening,” she said. That parent wrote an anonymous letter to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus, and administrators responded by firing Hale later in March for violating a morality clause.
Hale has filed a grievance and may also have on her side a Columbus city ordinance that prohibits employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation. She’s hired a lawyer, Thomas Tootle, who said fear of repercussions from the Catholic Church “forces people in the closet.”
Hale says her sexuality was never an issue during her 19 years at Bishop Watterson. “I’m a very private person. I think the kids realize I’m there if they need me, but I would never talk about anything like that,” she said. “If they had to describe me, they would say I’m a fanatic about soccer, I have a dog named Boomer and I have three kids I talk about a lot. But beyond that, they wouldn’t know anything else about me.”
“The school claims its mission is to teach its students about love, acceptance, and tolerance, and yet it did none of this in the way it treated Ms. Hale,” the petition, started by Jackson Garrity, reads. “That is why we all have to stand up together and let it be known that this decision is unacceptable. If we do not fight this issue now, it will happen again, and that is not something we can allow.”
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