Faith in the public arena can be a difficult balance sometimes. A perfect example of this is the case reported in Florida today where a teacher who has been fired from a private Christian School is suing the school for discrimination. According to the article, Jarretta Hamilton went in and asked for maternity leave and the director of the school suggested they really couldn’t afford it. Later in the conversation, the director asked Hamilton, who has only been married for a matter of months, if she had conceived before getting married. When she admitted that she had, she was terminated for moral reasons (fornication).Okay – wow! I believe as the head of a Christian organization, I have a right to hold my employees to a moral standard, but this is really a horrible mistake by this school! Yes it was immoral for the woman to have sex before marriage, but the couple got married and they’ve had the baby, so doesn't it seem pharisaical of the school to conveniently file moral charges against someone they obviously didn’t want to have to pay maternity leave to? This is the kind of thing that so often gives Christianity a bad name.
On the one hand, I hate the state is getting involved in a case like this because there are times when a Christian organization needs to act to protect the moral standards it’s trying to uphold but on the other hand this is not one of those cases and this should have never happened! If Jesus were down there is Florida I think he would have probably asked those school officials which one of them is sinless enough to cast the first stone!
