Moral highness
Morality is not what the Catholic Church says it is. That's the message we get, loud and clear, with the recent decision of the Supreme Court examining whether an all-girls Catholic school can dismiss an employee for getting pregnant out of wedlock.
To cut the suspense short, no. St. Scholastica's College Westgrove cannot fire an employee for having sexual relations outside marriage and heavens!, getting pregnant for all the impressionable young Catholic schoolgirls to see. That's what the high court said, arms akimbo, when it looked into the case of Ms. Leus, a non-teacher who happened to have the luck of possessing a healthy reproductive womb just itching to be fertilized.
Justice Bienvenido Reyes penned the ground breaking decision, which will surely hinder all his granddaughters' pending applications for admission into convent schools nationwide. According to the Justice, as liberally annotated by moi:
"There is no law which penalizes an unmarried mother by reason of her sexual conduct or proscribes consensual sexual activity between two unmarried persons. (Yeah!) Such conduct is not denounced by public and secular morality. It may be an unusual arrangement (trust me, Justice, it's not unusual. At least, not now in 2015). But it certainly is not disgraceful or immoral within the contemplation of the law."
Stunning, right? You might think, the school already had a slam dunk in its hands when they fired the preggie employee. After all, "disgraceful or immoral conduct" is a specific ground for termination under the Manual of Regulation for Private Schools. So, there's a specific provision in the basic code for all schools that says once an employee slips on the scarlet letter, she can get sacked, pronto.
But, surprise surprise! The Court refused to let the school's definition of morality prevail. Instead, it said we should all look at what the law says morality is. It's not religious morality, but secular morality that's important to refer to when judging if the employee's conduct was indeed immoral. So, having skipped merrily away from how the Catholics define morality, the Justice then went gaily down the path of legal morality.
So what is morality under the law? This gets confusing, even to me, because we had studied in law school that morals are different from law. Based on what I was taught, I developed this rule of thumb where Law is what is written in the statute books, while Morals is an unwritten code of conduct.
So it was always a losing battle whenever I would try to pick fights against the label of immorality, because no one could really help me, with definitive authority, with wise ass arguments like this charitable prostitute is moral and that sanctimonious judgmental priest is immoral. And believe you me, arguing that homosexuality per se is not immoral has not been the easiest of crusades. And how about the novel argument (at least in this society) of the immorality of firing an employee because of pregnancy when all that will do is endanger the innocent fetus who may not get the nutrition it requires just because mama ain't got a job.?
In any case, that's what Justice Reyes just did. He said morals must be that which (I paraphrase but dear readers feel free to read the case to comfort yourselves) determines the conditions for the existence of human society, or the progress of human society. So any conduct that endangers those conditions, or undermines human progress, would qualify as immoral. Conversely, conduct is not immoral just because it is "proscribed by the beliefs of one religion or the other." Hallelujah!
Applying this test, and looking at two single people just having a little bit of romance and a lot of tickling under the stars while thoughtlessly forgetting everything they learned about family planning, it doesn't seem as if human existence is endangered or anything as serious as that. Ergo, they were not immoral! Foolish maybe, but not immoral. Aroused, definitely, but definitely not immoral.
And so, you nasty school you, thou shalt not terminate on the basis of pre-marital sex. And moving forward, better be careful about how thou shalt define morality, because it ain't your definition that will win. It's going to be secular society's.
Moving forward, the religious sector has their work cut out for them. Whereas before, they were the definitive authority for what is moral and not, now, they aren't. It will be a struggle to sway people's intellects (hopefully not emotions) towards preferred definitions. A new war has just been declared.
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