Teacher Fired After Admitting ‘Fornication’

Last Updated on February 3, 2021

Monday on Today, a fourth-grade teacher who had been terminated from a Christian private school appeared to tell her side of an unusual story about marriage, morality and sex.

She’s suing the Florida school district where she used to work before she went to her principal to request six weeks of maternity leave. According to her story, the principal asked an odd question:

“Well, I’m just trying to do the math here. When did you get married again?”

She says he then asked if she conceived prior to marriage.

When she said she had, she soon found herself out of a job, and her attorney said that the school said that it wasn’t her pregnancy but “fornication, sex outside of marriage,” that caused her termination. The school also added that she agreed in her contract to uphold the school’s values.

Something’s seriously wrong with this story.

It may well be, as she claims, that the principal’s attitude is what’s wrong. She also added that she had no problem answering his questions honestly because there was nothing specific in her contract with the school to indicate that sex outside of wedlock was a fireable offense.

But even if the principal has a strong sense of morality when it comes to such things, seriously: who asks that question of an employee?

Really.

If she’s pregnant, she’s pregnant. She either gets the maternity leave or she doesn’t, and no matter what happens, she’ll be out six weeks no matter when the baby comes…whether it’s the due date, a date before that or a date after that.

And when you’re talking about a mere three week difference, since that’s the time period prior to the wedding when it’s estimated that they actually did conceive, you’d have to be so obsessive that you’d have to pull out a calendar and count weeks against a wedding date just to see if it times out correctly.

What it sounds like to me — and maybe this is just me — is that this principal already had an issue with this teacher and was looking for a reason to oust her. I can’t imagine being in a position of authority in a Christian school and having an employee come to me with her husband to tell me she was pregnant, and turn the discussion into an interrogation into whether the sex happened after the vows.

I just can’t imagine doing that. What I’m pretty sure I’d do instead was congratulate them. But again, maybe that’s just me.

Consulting a calendar to count backwards from due date to wedding date is the kind of thing a stereotypical church lady might do in the desperate search for gossip. I can’t imagine that this teacher’s students would have done so, and I even have a hard time believing that any parent happy with her teaching would have, either.

Even so, I question whether this is an appropriate way for the school to demonstrate the importance of forgiveness to its students.