Catholic Charities fired a Mississippi employee on International Women’s Day for discussing her former pro-choice advocacy work in a recent magazine article.
Lori Gregory is the former program director of Hope Haven, a children’s crisis mental health facility in Jackson, Mississippi. Hope Haven provides free counseling for at-risk adolescents without private insurance, many of whom are in foster care. Gregory had worked for Catholic Charities since 2002, beginning as a volunteer and working her way up to program director. She was fired unexpectedly Wednesday morning during a meeting with the local bishop, in reaction to a feature article in Find It Fondren’s recent women’s issue.
Entitled Stand Up, Be Heard, the article lauded Gregory’s social-advocacy work, her old op-ed columns (penned under a pseudonym), and her outspoken opposition to Missississippi’s 2011 anti-abortion legislation Proposition 26, which, the article claimed, “threaten[ed] … Gregory’s beliefs”. The article then commended her volunteer work at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a local abortion clinic.
Her employers at the Catholic diocese cited the article as a violation of the church’s code of ethics in a termination letter that they presented her during this morning’s meeting.
“If I’ve got to go down, I’d rather go down for something I really, really believe in,” Gregory said. “Now the International Women’s Day thing is just the Band-Aid of irony on it.”
Gregory had been warned about making pro-choice statements before. In 2013, she wrote an op-ed article for Slate about her work at the Jackson Women’s Health Center. Her employers reprimanded her for the article and made her promise to stop speaking out in favor of abortion rights and to end her volunteer work at the abortion clinic. These terms were presented as mandatory conditions of employment.
Gregory agreed to stop. “It broke my heart. It was one of my most favorite things to do,” she said. “I spent two years of my life intensively involved in social justice work with women here … And it was a great joy of mine but I also knew that I needed to have a job.
“And at the time, I was having some health issues. I needed to have insurance. All the regular stuff that you need as an American. I was not in a position to give up my employment so I elected to no longer write or do the justice work or do my job. And I was very sad about it for a long time. Which is why this time, I’m not going to be quiet.” Gregory also said Hope Haven was the only provider in Mississippi that offered crisis services to kids without private insurance.
The article in Find it Fondren’s says that Gregory still escorts women at the abortion clinic, but she says she stopped volunteering after her talk with her bosses in 2013, which Gregory thinks was a misunderstanding with the journalist. She believes it’s unfair that an article mentioning her previous pro-choice advocacy work could be grounds for termination.
Maureen Smith, the communications director for the Catholic diocese of Jackson, would not comment specifically on Gregory’s termination. But she said employees of the Catholic Church were expected to follow the church’s core teachings.
“As a church, we are a pro-life entity. When you work for the Catholic Church, you work for the church in all aspects. There is a pro-life ethic in everything we do. I don’t know how you can work for the Catholic Church and be a part of a pro-life ethic and be in conflict with it at the same time,” Smith said. “Why would you do that? If I was walking around saying things against church teachings, that’s hypocritical and that’s problematic.”
Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University, said federal anti-discrimination law allowed religious organizations to discriminate on the basis of religion. “Courts have had some doubts and questions about what it means to discriminate on the basis of religion, but one of the things they have done is defer strongly to the core doctrines and beliefs of the organization, and if someone is not in compliance with them, then they may be terminated,” he said.
Gregory is a single mother with a seven-year-old daughter. She’s not worried about telling her daughter about her firing.
“I think that I will just tell her that I lost my job because I believed in something,” Gregory said. “And there are a few things that I know that she believes in real strongly as well. First one is that girls are awesome. And I think that if she knows that about me, then that’s a good thing. But I also had a mother that walked out of a job in the 70s due to a pay-gap issue. So I had a good model.”
The Catholic diocese confirmed that Hope Haven would continue to operate.
Mississippi pro-choice activist fired on International Women’s Day
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