I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Former math teacher Madeline Weishuhn has lost another appeal in her long-running lawsuit against against the Catholic Diocese of Lansing. Weishuhn taught math and religion classes at a Catholic elementary school in Mt. Morris, Michigan, from 1999 to 2005, when she was fired by the school after what the court calls a “series of employment-related incidents.”
She filed suit against the Catholic Diocese that runs the school, claiming that they had terminated her for retaliatory reasons which violate state anti-discrimination law. The diocese argued that they were exempt from such laws because of the ministerial exception, a legal doctrine that prevents the state from interfering in employment decisions within churches.
After much procedural haggling and an appeal that hung on whether the ministerial exception existed in this state, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the exception does exist and remanded the case back to the lower court to determine whether Weishuhn was a ministerial employee or not. The lower court determined that she was, in fact, a ministerial employee, thus triggering the ministerial exception and dismissing the case.
Weishuhn appealed that ruling, arguing that her job as a math teacher was not ministerial because math is a secular subject. Unfortunately for her, she had given an interview to a Catholic magazine some time earlier in which she stated that her math students “hear me talk about God and religion in math class as much as I do in religion class. I’m not the kind of person who separates religion—it’s part of who I am and what I teach. . . . My ultimate goal is to help each student develop into a young Christian person who has a conscience.” Thus, the court ruled that the plaintiff herself does not really believe math teaching to be secular but to be part of her larger ministerial mission.
The appeals court upheld the dismissal. You can see the full ruling here (PDF).
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