Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School is a very bad school

Before saying anything about the Supreme Court decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. EEOC we first need to say something about the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School itself.

It’s a bad school. It’s a very bad school and no parent should consider sending their children there.

Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School teaches children bad things. It teaches children wrong things and untrue things. It does not provide a decent eduction. It’s a bad school.

I’m not referring here to the school’s formal curriculum, which for all I know is perfectly sufficient. But apart from that curriculum, the school also teaches its students reprehensible things about fairness, decency, the Golden Rule and how humans ought to behave to other humans when they get sick.

And the school is teaching these things so emphatically that it was willing to fight for them in court.

What happened was this: A teacher at the school got sick and took a leave of absence. The school refused to let her return, because she got sick and might get sick again, and employing people with medical conditions that sometimes cause them to miss work can be inconvenient and more expensive than employing people without such medical conditions.

By kicking that teacher to the curb, the school is teaching a lesson. It’s a hideous lesson. That lesson says that the responsible thing, the right thing, the human thing and the Lutheran thing to do when someone in your community is sick or weak is to cut them loose so they don’t drag you down.

That is the lesson above every other lesson that Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School is teaching to its students.

And that makes Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School a very, very bad school. It makes Hosanna-Tabor a dangerous, negligent place to send your children.

It doesn’t matter what else the school teaches its students. It doesn’t matter if its curriculum for reading, writing and arithmetic is excellent, or if its students perform above average on standardized achievement tests. Because even if all of that were true, then the best thing you could hope for in sending your kids to Hosanna-Tabor is that they would graduate as morally stunted little jerks with high SAT scores. And no responsible parent wants that for their kids.

I do want to discuss the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling in the Hosanna-Tabor case — both what I think they got right and what I think they (deliberately) left unsettled. But before getting into any of that, I needed first to say this: Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School is a very bad school. The school won its court case and is now celebrating that it has the legal right to behave badly, but a 9-0 ruling from the highest court confirming that they have the right to be assholes doesn’t change the fact that they’re assholes.