Chicago Public Schools (CPS) prides itself on its commitment to diversity and cultural responsiveness. Here are two brief excerpts from CPS’s Culturally Responsive Education and Diversity Policy that demonstrate CPS’s deep devotion to diversity, equity, and workplace representation:
- Diversity includes all the ways in which people differ, and it encompasses all the different characteristics that make one individual or group different from another. A broad definition includes … religion. … It also involves different ideas, perspectives, and values.
- Ensuring all students have a culturally responsive education means we will affirm and support the culture [and] identity … each CPS stakeholder including … staff.
- Workforce equity requires CPS to eliminate institutional barriers … to employee attraction, selection, participation and retention for most impacted populations at the School, Office and Department level to ensure representativeness reflecting student demographics.
Don’t gloss over those excerpts. Read and digest them. Now take heed of what CPS is alleged to be doing to Moody Bible Institute.
Moody Bible Institute has a recently approved teacher certification program for training elementary school teachers who will be pursuing teaching positions in either public or private schools. Part of this degree-granting program is a student-teaching requirement.
CPS has made the outrageous demand that it will accept student teachers from Moody, if and only if, Moody signs “agreements with employment nondiscrimination provisions that forbid Moody from employing only those who share and live out its faith (the “Employment Provisions”).
In other words, CPS will bar all Moody students from student teaching in any CPS schools unless Moody forces its own employees to sign agreements that violate Moody’s religious convictions and authentic religious identity.
This is what diversity and representation look like to tyrannical leftists.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed a lawsuit on Moody’s behalf alleging that the Board of Education of the City of Chicago is violating both “the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
The ADF press release states that “Chicago Public Schools demands that Moody give up its religious hiring rights as a condition of participation,” by requiring Moody to sign two documents—a “Vendor Agreement” and a “Student Teaching Internship Agreement,” both of which say,
You agree that in performing under this order you shall not fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to compensation, or other terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of … religion … gender identity/expression [or] sexual orientation … or to limit, segregate, or classify employees or applicants for employment in any way that would deprive or tend to deprive any individual from equal employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect an individual’s status as an employee because of such person’s … religion … gender identity/expression [or] sexual orientation. You also agree to submit in writing, an affirmative action plan demonstrating your compliance with equal employment opportunity laws and Chicago Public Schools policy requiring equal employment opportunity to all.
In order to place student teachers in CPS schools, Moody would have to agree in writing to be willing to hire homosexuals, trannies, and Muslims.
The thorny problem for CPS is that prohibitions of religious discrimination mean that government entities like the CPS may not take religious views into consideration with regard to employment. And Moody’s policies regarding homosexuality, cross-dressing, and religious beliefs are derived from and central to its theological orthodoxy.
CPS has a long and infamous history of academic failures and sex abuse scandals, and yet it is so committed to controversial leftist faith-based beliefs on sexuality, gender, and religion that it’s willing to sacrifice the needs of CPS students on the altar of leftism.
CPS, run by ignoramuses and leftwing activists—but I repeat myself—is willing to violate constitutionally protected religious rights and state laws to advance its contemptible ideology.
CPS is also willing to violate its own principles as articulated in its Culturally Responsive Education and Diversity policy that “includes all the ways people differ,” that “will affirm and support the culture [and] identity” of “staff,” and that seeks “to ensure representativeness reflecting student demographics.”
Presumably, there are some theologically conservative Christians among CPS students who may appreciate being represented rather than villainized.
To CPS leftists, not even filling the approximately 500 teacher vacancies in CPS elementary schools is worth allowing all those young Christians near a classroom.
Moody tried to avoid a lawsuit by proposing an “amendment to the Employment Provisions that would ‘recognize Moody is afforded certain exemptions and protections regarding nondiscrimination laws.’”
Not good enough for Big Brother, who (wrongly) believes resistance to leftism is futile. Complete and absolute submission to the will of the leftists who run the CPS is non-negotiable.
And so, the people’s money will be spent fighting a lawsuit, all because the CPS is hell-bent on discriminating based on religion.