Wait A Minute! Wasn't Mary ....?

Though I really don't want to digress into my views on whether I thought that Mary had a virgin birth, I believe that all agree that according to the Bible, she was an unmarried woman at the time of conception (however that came about). So how is it that they are asking teachers to convey the teachings of the Catholic faith when the mother of the man the very church was built upon found herself in the same predicament.

Newsday reports today on a 26-year-old teacher at a Catholic preschool who was fired last month for being unwed and pregnant. Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union has taken up her case, and filed a complaint against both the school and the Diocese of Brooklyn.

"This is a difficult situation for every person involved, but the school had no choice but to follow the principles contained in the teachers' personnel handbook," diocese spokesman Frank DeRosa said in a statement. Newsday notes that the handbook says that each teacher must "convey the teachings of the Catholic faith by his or her words and actions."

But lawyers at the NYCLU -- which argued a similar suit in Buffalo in 2003 and won -- argued that administrators enforced the policy in a way that disproportionately affects women.

"The school used her pregnancy as a marker," attorney Cassandra Stubbs told Newsday. "How do they determine if male employees engage in premarital sex?"

If the father of the child worked at the same school, I wonder if he would have been fired?