By Mary Best
Opinion Editor
As a Catholic elementary school alum, it’s appalling to hear about blatant discrimination from a place that heavily promotes treating everyone with respect.
Especially when the victim didn’t do anything wrong.
Music teacher Al Fischer was fired from both his job at St. Ann Catholic School in Normandy, Mo. and from his job as music director at St. Rose Philippine Duchesne Catholic Church in Florissant, Mo. because he decided to marry his male partner, according to a March 5 Huffington Post article.
Fischer lost his teaching job after four years due to his “public demonstration of a lifestyle inconsistent with Catholic teaching,” even though his sexual orientation was well-known at the school, according to the same article.
A big part of being a professional involves separating your work life and personal life. The church officials who fired Fischer were completely out of line. He lost his job because of his personal life, which didn’t seem to be something he brought to work.
The priest at St. Rose also said Fischer’s pending marriage had become too much of a public issue. How is that even measured? Were people rioting in the streets because a music teacher was marrying his partner? I doubt it.
A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of St. Louis said Fischer had defied expectations laid out in “the Christian Witness Statement that is on the first page of the Parish Employee Handbook,” as reported in the same article. Fischer also signed a Christian Witness Statement at the school, which required him to “not take a public position contrary to the Catholic Church” and “demonstrate a public life consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Seriously, Catholic Church, we know you frown upon gay marriage. We get it.
But why does it have to matter if a church or Catholic school employee is gay or not, or even if they marry or not?
Yes, I understand what he signed upon being hired. But Fischer didn’t even plan to marry in Missouri; his date was set for March 9 in New York City, according to the same article. Call me crazy, but regardless of what states permit gay marriage, traveling to a destination wedding is a way of making your wedding more private. Was Fischer trying to make all of his students support gay marriage? No. Was he televising his wedding to the entire country to force them all into a certain way of thinking? No.
The obsession some people have with gay marriage being unnatural and trying to make it illegal is getting ridiculous. I really don’t see the problem with a gay person marrying the person they love. They aren’t hurting anyone; it’s quite the opposite.
It’s no shock that it’s hard to get a teaching job no matter where you live. Fischer lost his because he wanted to make a lifelong commitment to someone. In what society does that make any sense whatsoever?
Not to mention, what kind of message does that send to his former students? I know if I was their age, I would be asking my parents why my teacher wasn’t at school anymore, and I hope America’s youth is not brainwashed to the point where it wouldn’t ever question it.
This debate is disgusting, and for a denomination that seems to place a large emphasis on life, it really needs to calm down on preventing people from living it.
bestmk10@bonaventure.edu
