CATHOLIC SCHOOL TEACHER MAY HAVE BEEN DISMISSED FOR SSM: From the San Francisco Chronicle

Eleven years after meeting in a college poetry class, Doug Neff and Corey Rothermel donned matching tuxedos and headed across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco City Hall, where their ministers married them. ...

And he feels that way even though he believes marrying cost him his job as a religion teacher at Bishop O'Dowd, a Catholic high school in Oakland. In California, it may be illegal for administrators at a religious institution to fire a gay teacher for marrying his partner, some legal experts say. But the law isn't cut- and-dried -- and because state-sanctioned same-sex marriage is a relatively new phenomenon, there isn't a lot of legal precedent. ...

James Sweeney, a constitutional lawyer specializing in the First Amendment, said that generally, "matters of religious conscience are protectable interests that the law needs to accommodate whenever possible."

But Shannon Minter, legal director at National Center for Lesbian Rights, said "there's a very significant possibility that he is protected" by California's anti-discrimination law.

Nonprofit religious organizations aren't subject to all the provisions of the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act, which prohibits sexual orientation discrimination, but that exemption is narrow, Minter said. It may apply in Neff's case, but it depends on a variety of factors including whether he was performing religious duties and whether he was teaching strictly people who adhere to Catholicism.

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posted by Eve at 1:21 AM | link

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