A court of appeals has ruled that a Catholic North Carolina school had the right to fire teacher Lonnie Billard after he announced his marriage to another man on social media in 2014, the Associated Press reported.
Billard – who was once named the school’s Teacher of the Year – had been a full-time drama teacher at the school for 10 years and became a substitute English teacher in 2012. The school reportedly said it fired him as a substitute due to his “advocacy in favor of a position that is opposed to what the church teaches about marriage.”
The decision by a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, reverses the original 2021 decision by U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn, who ruled that Charlotte Catholic High School and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employers from sex discrimination.
In 2020, the Supreme Court announced a landmark decision in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, which said that Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex also bans anti-LGBTQ+ job discrimination. The idea is that it’s impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity without taking sex into account.
Cogburn ruled that the school’s actions were not protected by religious exemptions: “Plaintiff is a lay employee, who comes onto the campus of a religious school for the limited purpose of teaching secular classes, with no mandate to inculcate students with Catholic teachings.”
The appeals court disagreed, deciding that the school was in the right due to a “ministerial exception” to Title VII that protects religious institutions’ freedom to exclusively hire employees “who perform tasks so central to their religious missions — even if the tasks themselves do not advertise their religious nature.”
The opinion, written by Circuit Judge Pamela Harris, an Obama appointee, said the school clearly wanted its religious values imbued as much in the teaching of Shakespeare as in the Bible.
“Our court has recognized before that seemingly secular tasks like the teaching of English and drama may be so imbued with religious significance that they implicate the ministerial exception,” Harris wrote.
The ACLU of North Carolina, which represented Billard, released a statement along with the law firm representing Billard, calling the decision “heartbreaking.”
“Every worker should be entitled to equal protection under the law, and the Supreme Court held as recently as 2020 that this fundamental freedom extends to LGBTQ workers. While today’s decision is narrowly tailored to Mr. Billard and the facts of his employment, it nonetheless threatens to encroach on that principle by widening the loopholes employers may use to fire people like Mr. Billard for openly discriminatory reasons.”
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