The Department Of Justice Wants Parochial Schools Shut Down

An early morning headline appeared on the October 4, 2011, edition of the Daily Caller website that read, “Obama’s lawyers bid to regulate religious hiring“. At first glance it looked like it was just one of those headlines meant to entice you into reading a story, but the headline is extremely accurate. The Department of Justice wants parochial schools shut down.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided to become involved in a civil law suit between a client the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is representing and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church. While reading through the story, I could not help but think of all the damage the Obama administration and Eric Holder have done through the DOJ in the past three years.

This case, like most of the cases the DOJ has handled recently, is MUCH more than it seems because it wants the Supreme Court to remove ministerial exceptions from parochial schools.

The case surrounds a Lutheran school teacher who became ill with a diagnosed sleeping disorder that required she take a few months from work. The congregation hired a replacement and asked the teacher to resign. In 2004, the teacher took her grievance to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio in the form of a law suit, but lost. Now, she has brought the case to the Supreme Court.

This case is unfortunate because the teacher who is suing the parochial school, was not a victim. She is a person who is upset because she suffered a physical malady that was no fault of her employer. Parochial schools are privately funded, having much less money to work with than their publicly funded counterparts. The school needed a teacher, she was not available, and they probably did not have the funding to keep her on the payroll and hire the teacher they needed. Parochial schools can not, simply, raise taxes to pay for teachers wages and benefits, school maintenance and repair, or the rising costs of education due to inflation.

So, on Wednesday, October 5, 2011, the DOJ will be asking the Supreme Court to remove ministerial exemptions and make all but a few core religious jobs subject to employment law.

 So why would the Department of Justice be interested in a petty EEOC case?

The answer is so simple, it will astound you: “They want to eliminate the competition.”

It is already widely known that most parochial school achieve better ISTEP testing scores than their public counterparts. But what is also becoming more widely know is the fact that parochial schools are doing it at half the cost. Eliminating the ministerial exception from equal employment opportunity laws will bankrupt parochial schools across America and the DOJ knows it.

Even worse, Lutherans send their children to Lutheran schools to learn the Lutheran religion from other Lutherans. The same holds true with the Muslim, Mormon, Presbyterian, Evangelical, and etc. religious faiths. Since employment law restricts employers from hiring people based upon their religious beliefs, Church congregations will no longer be allowed, under penalty of law, to question or deny a teaching position to someone of a different religious faith.

Logically, it will not take long before someone, who is not affiliate with the denomination, becomes offended by religious teachings in the school or begin objecting that a Church congregation has not hired enough teachers outside of their particular faith. Inevitably, the laws about teaching religion in public schools would need to take effect in parochial school to protect the sensitivities of non-believing employees of the school. In most cases, the very reason people pay tuition rates for parochial schooling, as opposed to public schooling, is that their child is able to learn their religion, pray openly, and discuss their religion with teachers of like-mind.

So far, Attorney General Eric Holder in league with the Obama administration have use the DOJ to:

• fight 26 States in the Union, all the way up to the Supreme Court, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009.
• defend abortion clinics while telling Americans that their government does not fund abortions.
• defend the stoppage of drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
• attempt to bring Guantanamo Bay terrorists to American civil courts for trial and sentencing.
• report Arizona as a human rights violator to the United Nations for its illegal immigration law.
• ignore the Defense of Marriage Act.
• refuse to address, both, the “fast and furious” and SOLYNDRA scandals.

… and now we can add “attempting to have ministerial exceptions removed from employment law” to its list of abuses of power.

Make no mistake about it, the Department of Justice wants parochial schools shut down to cover up the monetary waste of the Department of Education and low performance scores of publicly funded schools. IF I were conspiratorial minded, I might even go as far as to say that government wants complete control of the education system in America so that IT can be the sole definition of curriculum, culture, morals, and ethics to America’s youth.