A gay teacher who was fired from a Greensburg Catholic school after administrators learned he had a husband will get to keep fighting his discrimination case in federal court.
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan denied Aquinas Academy of Greensburg’s attempt to end Kenneth Ference’s lawsuit before trial in a Sept. 30 opinion.
There is little mystery about why Ference lost his job.
Ference was already insured through his husband when he began teaching at Aquinas, so he filled out paperwork declining the school’s health coverage. That paperwork disclosed his marriage.
Aquinas fired him.
The school does not seriously dispute that Ference’s same-sex marriage led to his termination. Instead, the fight is over whether Aquinas, as a Catholic institution, had the legal right to fire him for it.
For now, Ranjan’s answer is essentially no.
The ruling doesn’t mean Ference has won his case. But Ranjan rejected Aquinas’ argument that the religious exemptions built into federal employment discrimination law automatically protect the school from Ference’s claim.
And that distinction could matter well beyond one Catholic school in Westmoreland County.
A religious exemption has its limits
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination because of sex. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, that protection includes gay and transgender workers.
Religious organizations do have exemptions under Title VII. Among other things, religious institutions have considerable freedom to make employment decisions based on religion.
Aquinas argued that Ference’s firing should fall within those protections because the Catholic Church considers same-sex marriage contrary to its teachings.
Ranjan wasn’t convinced.
There is a difference, his opinion concludes, between discriminating based on religion and committing sex discrimination for a religious reason.
That might sound like legal hair-splitting, but it gets to the heart of the case.
If Ference had been a woman married to a man, his marriage would not have been an issue. He was fired because he is a man married to another man. Under Bostock, that is sex discrimination.
The fact that Aquinas says its motivation came from Catholic doctrine does not automatically change the type of discrimination involved.
Ranjan noted that no federal appellate court has accepted the broader argument that Title VII’s religious exemptions give religious organizations permission to engage in sex discrimination simply because that discrimination is religiously motivated.
That argument wasn’t enough to get the lawsuit dismissed. Aquinas still has a potentially decisive constitutional defense.
Is a sixth-grade math teacher a minister?
Aquinas has another defense, and this one could ultimately decide whether Ference can recover anything at all.
It’s called the “ministerial exception.”
The First Amendment gives religious organizations broad authority over employees who perform important religious functions. And despite the name, someone doesn’t have to be an ordained minister, priest, or pastor for the exception to apply.
So the question becomes less about what Aquinas called Ference and more about what he actually did every day.
That’s where things get interesting.
Ference is Lutheran.
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He was hired in August 2021 when Aquinas needed a teacher. According to the court record, he applied, interviewed, and got the job on the same day. He started the following Monday.
He taught sixth-grade math, science, and social studies.
He did not teach religion. In fact, because Ference was not Catholic, Aquinas did not permit him to teach the subject or provide students with spiritual direction.
According to Ference’s account, he did not lead students in prayer or provide spiritual instruction. His role during Mass was essentially to supervise students, he said. Aquinas argues that its teachers carry religious responsibilities throughout the school day, even when teaching secular subjects.
The school points to its faculty handbook and Ference’s contract, which describe teachers as participants in Aquinas’ Catholic mission and include expectations that employees model Catholic values. Parts of the school’s curriculum also incorporate religious concepts, including references to God in science instruction.
In other words, Aquinas says being a teacher at Aquinas is inherently part of the school’s religious mission.
Ference says he was a Lutheran hired to teach sixth-graders math.
If Ference’s actual duties were sufficiently religious, Aquinas could still prevail under the ministerial exception. But Ranjan found too many disputed facts about Ference’s duties to decide whether the exception applies.
Those facts will have to be resolved at trial before the court can determine whether the exception shields Aquinas from the lawsuit.
All because of an insurance waiver
Ference wasn’t demanding that a Catholic school bless his marriage. He wasn’t asking to teach Catholic theology. He wasn’t even asking Aquinas to insure his husband.
He already had health insurance because of his husband. Ference disclosed that fact because he was declining Aquinas’ insurance coverage.
According to Ranjan’s opinion, there was no evidence that Ference had publicly discussed his marriage at school before the insurance paperwork revealed it.
That mundane piece of employment paperwork exposed a same-sex marriage that the school decided was incompatible with its expectations for employees.
And that is what makes the case especially relevant to queer people who work for religiously affiliated employers.
Religious organizations are major employers. Their payrolls include plenty of people whose jobs aren’t obviously religious: teachers, nurses, administrators, accountants, maintenance workers, communications staff, social workers, and countless others.
The constitutional protections afforded to churches and religious institutions are substantial. But exactly where those protections end, and where an LGBTQ employee’s ordinary civil rights begin, remains the battleground.
Ference’s case puts that boundary under a microscope.
Aquinas also argued that being forced to employ Ference despite his marriage would interfere with its First Amendment rights, including its freedom of speech and expressive association. Ranjan declined to end the case on those grounds as well.
None of this means the court has decided Aquinas illegally discriminated against Ference.
It hasn’t.
Nor did Ranjan rule that Catholic schools must abandon religious standards for their employees.
Instead, the ruling says being a religious institution does not automatically make a sex-discrimination lawsuit disappear.
Now the case may turn on a much more practical question. Was Kenneth Ference performing a religious ministry? Or was he a sixth-grade teacher who happened to work at a Catholic school?
Aquinas and Ference have very different answers. A federal court isn’t willing to choose between them without a trial.
