(MintPress) – It may sound unlawful or like the plot of a bad movie, but it’s exactly what happened to Teri James last October, who was fired for violating her employment contract by having sex.
As James told Today, the 29-year-old resident of El Cajon, Calif., was called into her supervisor’s office at San Diego Christian College and was asked if she was pregnant.
According to the lawsuit she filed in San Diego County Superior Court, James was pregnant, and since she was not married, her actions were seen as a violation of school rules so she was fired.
“I had to leave right after the meeting. I had to go into the office with all of my co-workers and say I’m leaving,” James said. “I never came back so I don’t know what my co-workers thought, but for me, it was humiliating. I felt like I was in trouble.”
In her termination letter, the school wrote that she was being let go because “Teri engaged in activity outside the scope of the Handbook and Community Covenant that does not build up the college’s mission.”
San Diego Christian College has its employees sign a “community covenant,” which is a two-page contract that asks employees and students to abstain from drugs, alcohol and tobacco and “abusive anger, malice, jealousy, lust, sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex, adultery, pornography and homosexuality, evil desires and prejudice based on race, sex or socioeconomic status.”
James says she had to sign the document because she needed a job and never thought anything like this would happen.
Her attorney, Gloria Allred, added that the document does not say you will be fired if you don’t comply.
But as Christine Nazer of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said, James can be fired if she violated a contract with the school. Nazer did add that the case is not clear cut, as an organization can require employees to not engage in premarital sex, but they can’t fire her because she gets pregnant.
Working at the college for two years as a financial aid specialist, James says she signed the letter in August and became pregnant a few weeks later.
Adding insult to injury, James said that after she was fired, the school offered a job to her then-fiance, now husband, even though they were aware he had engaged in premarital sex as well. Her husband did not accept the job.
As odd as they it be, James’ case is more common than we may like to admit.
In April 2012 a Texas woman, Cathy Samford, a former teacher and volleyball coach at Heritage Christian Academy, was fired after she became pregnant out of wedlock.
“I didn’t think I would lose my job,” Samford told ABC News. “I was in shock and devastated and that’s when I said, ‘If this is the problem, I’m willing, and so is my fiancé, to go ahead and get married. That wasn’t the issue. We were going to get married regardless.”
Dr. Ron Taylor, the school’s headmaster, said that Samford was fired because her status as a role model was put in jeopardy by her pregnancy.
“It’s not that she’s pregnant. The issue here is being an unmarried mother,” Taylor explained. “Everything that we stand for says that we want our teachers, who we consider to be in the ministry, to model what a Christian man or woman should be.”
“It’s against the law to fire someone for them taking a pregnancy leave and you can’t preventatively fire someone. You can’t contract around anti-discrimination laws,” Sanford’s Lawyer, Colin Walsh, explained to ABC News. “Just being generally religious or upholding Christian values is not enough to evoke the ministerial exception.”
The ministerial exemption is a legal precedent that makes it virtually impossible for employees of religious organizations to sue for discrimination.
Similarly, two women in Ohio filed lawsuits after they were fired by Catholic schools after informing the principals at their respective schools they were pregnant.
Kathleen Quinlan, a first-grade teacher at Ascension Catholic School in Kettering, Ohio, says she was fired in the fall 2011 after she became pregnant with twin girls.
In a lawsuit she filed with the U.S. District Court in southern Ohio, Quinlan made sure to note that she was not an ordained minister nor did she lead children in prayer, as she was referencing a unanimous Supreme Court decision from the same year, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC.
In the case, the court dismissed a lawsuit by a Christian schoolteacher who claimed she was fired for a disability, saying that churches and affiliated schools have the right to choose who will minister to their faithful.
Ascension School told Quinlan she was fired because she didn’t comply with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which are to remain abstinent until after marriage. But Quinlan says the fact that she is female had a large role in her termination because it’s not obvious when men engage in premarital sex because they can’t become pregnant.
Christa Dias, who oversaw computer systems at Holy Family and St. Lawrence schools, was fired after becoming pregnant by way of artificial insemination. According to her lawsuit, which was filed in 2011 in U.S. District Court, she was fired because artificial insemination is a violation of church doctrine.
Unfortunately for Dias, because she was living with her long-term female partner, she breached the same contract she accused the church of breaking and the court did not rule in her favor. However the court did recognize that because Dias was not Catholic and not involved in any religious instruction, she could not be considered a minister.
Knowing this, James says she decided to file a lawsuit in the hope it will benefit the lives of other women employed by Christian organizations.
“I want to pave the way, say, Christian organizations, you can’t necessarily fall back on this,” she said. “You can’t hurt people like this. If you say that you stand for love and mercy and grace — stand for those who are weak.”
As of our deadline, San Diego Christian College had not responded to James’ lawsuit.