Catholic Teacher Single, Pregnant -- and Now Unemployed
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
December 7, 2005
(AgapePress) - - A Catholic school teacher in New York who was fired for becoming pregnant while unmarried is contesting her termination. St. Rose of Lima School in Queens recently fired pre-kindergarten teacher Michelle McCusker upon learning she had engaged in non-marital sex. With help from the New York Civil Liberties Union, McCusker has filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She informed the school of her condition one month after this school year began, and two days later was told she was being terminated at the end of October.
McCusker tells the NYCLU she has been "devastated" by the school's action. "This was my first teaching position and I was excited and looking forward to the school year with my young students," she says in a press release. "I don't understand how a religion that prides itself on being forgiving could terminate me because I am unmarried and choose to have a baby." McCusker was hired under a one-year contract to begin teaching in September 2005.
Frank DeRosa, a spokesman for the Brooklyn Diocese, which governs the school, explains the decision to fire the unmarried woman. McCusker, he says, violated standards in the school's personnel handbook. According to the spokesman, that handbook "gives an outline of what is expected in terms of promoting gospel values and the Christian tradition as something to be taught but also as a reality to be lived." He adds that the newly hired teacher signed a release form indicating she had received the handbook.
Evidently that is not the issue, according to the NYCLU, which contends the school is engaging in "pregnancy discrimination." The acting director of the legal group's Reproductive Rights Project says the school fired McCusker "ostensibly for engaging in non-marital sex, but neither the school nor the Diocese ... enforces this policy against men." The NYCLU spokesperson asserts that applying different policies to men and women employees is "classic sex discrimination."
But DeRosa says that is not true. "We would not discriminate in any instance, whether it's a male or a female, if there's a violation of the agreement to uphold by word and action, in a sense, the gospel values in our tradition," he explains.
DeRosa says in the light of the McCusker case, the vicar for education in the Brooklyn Diocese has suggested amending the personnel handbook to provide alternatives to employment termination for similar situations in the future.
