[Vision2020] One School’s Catholic Teaching

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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May 20, 2013
One School’s Catholic Teaching By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

COLUMBUS, Ohio — No one at the Catholic high school that fired Carla Hale
in March claimed that she was anything less than a terrific physical
education teacher and coach, devoted to the kids and adored by many of
them.

No one accused her of bringing her personal life into the gym or onto the
fields. By nature she’s private. And she loved her job too much to risk it
that way.

But she lost it nonetheless, and the how is as flabbergasting as the why is
infuriating.

Rather suddenly, her mother died, and an hour afterward, she and her
brother numbly went through the paces of a standard obituary, listing
survivors. Her brother included his wife. So Carla
included<http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/obituary.aspx?n=Jeanne-Roe&pid=163314539#fbLoggedOut>her
partner, Julie, whom her mother had known well and loved. Leaving
Julie
out would have been unthinkable, though Carla didn’t really think it
through at the time. Her grief was still raw.

A parent of one of the school’s students spotted the obituary, and wrote an
anonymous letter to the school and to the Diocese of Columbus, saying that
they couldn’t allow a woman like Carla to educate Catholic children.

So they don’t, not anymore. In a termination notice, the principal
explained that Carla’s “spousal relationship violates the moral laws of the
Catholic Church.” That was the sum of the stated grievance against her, and
after more than 18 years at Bishop Watterson High School, Carla, 57, was
done.

“The way it all came about was just so unfathomable,” she told me on
Sunday. “An obituary?”

I met her and Julie, 48, in their house outside Columbus, where the front
lawn was neatly tended, the refrigerator was plastered with photos of
relatives, the chocolate lab dozed in his reserved spot on the sectional
and Carla kept a box of tissues handy. Whenever she’s asked what her work
meant to her, she cries.

“Every morning,” she said, “from the time you walked into the building,
kids would be yelling down the hall, ‘Hey, Miss Hale, what are we going to
do today?’ ‘Hey, Miss Hale, I remembered those shoes.’ It felt so
comforting.” She had a sense of belonging. Of purpose.

Even now, after nearly two months of exile from the school, she’s still on
what she calls “bell time.” If the clock on her kitchen wall says 10:45
a.m., the voice in her head says, “Fourth period.”

There’s so much in the media, and in this column, about the progress of gay
rights, especially on the marriage front. But in the republic of Georgia
just days ago, Orthodox priests led thousands of people in an antigay
attack<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/world/europe/gay-rights-rally-is-attacked-in-georgia.html>.
In Greenwich Village, a young gay man was fatally
shot<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/nyregion/greenwich-village-alleged-antigay-killing.html?pagewanted=all>in
what’s been deemed a hate crime.

And at a kitchen table here in central Ohio, a typically cheerful woman
dabbed her eyes and wondered aloud what she’d done wrong.

The answer is in one sense simple: she made a life with another woman.
While the Catholic Church doesn’t condemn homosexuality per se, it
considers any physical expression of it sinful. And Carla’s “public
declaration of an extramarital relationship,” meaning the obituary,
indicated that she was flouting Catholic tenets and thus breaching her
contract, according to a statement the diocese e-mailed me.

But things get complicated when you consider the selectiveness of the
church’s outrage, the capriciousness of its mercy.

Until public exposure shamed them, many church leaders protected priests
whose sexual transgressions involved minors and were criminal.

Church leaders tolerate teachers at Catholic schools who are married with
no kids or with few. Some are surely using artificial birth control, which
the church officially opposes.

Besides which, Carla was guiding students through sit-ups, not psalms. The
school hired her though she’s Methodist, not Catholic.

She was then married to a man, but they split and, more than a decade ago,
she became involved with Julie.

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably
weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was
surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,”
Carla said. “Come on.”

There was no discussion or upset, not until the anonymous letter.

Neither the federal
government<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/opinion/beyond-basketball-and-bigotry-workplace-discrimination-based-on-sexual-orientation.html>nor
Ohio<http://www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/Employment_Laws_and_Policies.pdf>outlaws
employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Columbus
does, though whether it can be applied to religious groups is uncertain.
Carla’s lawyer, Thomas Tootle, has filed a complaint with the city anyway.

It’s been a big story here, with
thousands<http://www.change.org/petitions/diocese-of-columbus-reinstate-faculty-member-carla-hale>of
people publicly expressing support for her. She’s moved but mortified.
She didn’t seek and doesn’t enjoy the media attention.

“A lot of people want me to be bitter and go after the Catholic Church,”
she said, adding that others want to cast her as a lesbian heroine. She
just wants her job back, a recognition, she said, “that I’m a moral
individual who happens to be gay.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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