Your wedding announcement isn’t safe from discrimination
By WAYMON HUDSON
Benedictine University doesn’t mind you being gay – just as long as you don’t tell anyone.
Administrator Laine Tadlock, who was director of the education program at Benedictine, was recently forced from her job at the Catholic university in Springfield, Ill., after a local paper, The State Journal-Register, published her wedding announcement to her partner Kae Helstrom in Iowa. The university knew she was gay and about her out-of-state wedding, but apparently took issue with the announcement mentioning she worked at the university.
In a Sept. 30 letter to Tadlock’s attorney, Benedictine President William Carroll wrote, “… By publicizing the marriage ceremony in which she participated in Iowa, she has significantly disregarded and flouted core religious beliefs which, as a Catholic institution, it is our mission to uphold.”
That’s right. Marrying her partner “flouted” the Catholic institution so much that she couldn’t do her job anymore. I wonder how many other legal weddings of employees disregard the “core religious beliefs” of the church. By this down-the-rabbit-hole logic, there must certainly be no one on staff that is divorced … or that gasps curses or takes the lord’s name in vain in a public forum or on campus. That would flout the mission of the university, right?
This just boils down to plain anti-gay discrimination, even by the school’s own admission. Tadlock met that day with Carroll and Mike Bromberg, Dean of Academic Affairs.
Tadlock said Carroll told her he had consulted three Catholic bishops about the situation, including Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Springfield diocese. At least one person, Catholic activist Steve Brady of Petersburg, said he complained to Paprocki. He also wrote and sent emails to other church officials condemning Tadlock and Benedictine following the announcement’s publication.
So all it took was one anti-gay activist with no connection to the university to activate the Catholic Church’s longtime bias against LGBT people and force Tadlock from her job, despite the university’s own employee handbook statement on discrimination, which reads: “It is the university’s policy to provide equal employment opportunity to all persons without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, handicap, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation or any basis protected by law.”
People wonder why we need things like the Employment Non- Discrimination Act (ENDA) or need protections to simply live our lives in a way equal to our heterosexual counterparts. All it took was one person complaining to get a longtime educator removed from her job for simply celebrating a special (and legal) occasion in her life like any other person would do. Discrimination doesn’t get more plain than that.
