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A Gay Music Teacher Got Married. The Brooklyn Diocese Fired Him.

posted on November 1, 2021

Liam Stack of The New York Times reports that in October the Brooklyn Diocese fired Matthew LeBanca, a recently married gay music teacher. The incident has thrust into the spotlight the ministerial exception—a legal provision that allows religious institutions to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation if the employee in question holds a ministerial position. The diocese determined that LeBanca was a minister, although, “he has no formal religious training and his jobs did not involve religious education or preaching.” Stack writes that the loophole “provides the legal basis by which the Catholic Church can refuse to employ women as priests, but in recent years it has increasingly been used to fire people in same-sex civil marriages from jobs that have not traditionally been seen as part of the clergy.”

Read at The New York Times