Pregnant at 18. Hailed by Abortion Foes. Punished by Christian School

A Texas teacher is taking legal action after she was fired from a Christian middle school for being pregnant and unmarried.

Cathy Samford, 29, who was a volleyball coach and science teacher at Heritage Christian Academy in Rockwall, Tex., told ABCNews.com she had no idea she would lose her job over her pregnancy.

“I’m not just some teacher that went out to a bar and got pregnant went back to school saying it’s okay,” she said. “I was in a committed relationship the whole time, and probably would have been married if things had gone differently.

Samford and her attorney, Colin Walsh, are filing a lawsuit against the school and have already filed a charge of gender and pregnancy discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission….

Now that someone mentioned it, I did remember hearing about a similar case (not sure if it was this one from 2012), so I looked it up. This case was in the NY Daily News.

Again, the core issue remains - the school would not have known she was sleeping with anyone if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. Does that mean, legally, that they discriminated against her?

My gut feeling is that the court would say it is discrimination.

"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells

…..is that in the cases Jay mentions, the pregnancy “announced itself”, whereas in this case, the student announced the difficulty. It means something when we’re talking about whether someone is repentant or not.

It also strikes me in the case Jay mentions that if teachers were, say, getting to know each other well, it would be a lot harder to hide that “committed relationship”, which I would assume would mean “live in relationship.” To me, that’s the $64000 question—why aren’t we getting to know one another better? I actually spent the weekend getting to know my nephew better—he’s a 17 year old dad that theoretically came here to get better jobs to make child support, but when we talked with his parents in MI, we found that wasn’t exactly what was going on. Still processing what we’ve learned.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.