The one that matters

This week in bigoted news, a gay Catholic school teacher in Pennsylvania was fired for getting his marriage license.

Michael Griffin, a 13-year veteran teacher at Holy Ghost Prepatory in Bensalem, Pa., emailed the principal of the school, telling him he’d be late because he was getting the license.

After being told he would be fired if he actually got the license, Griffin defied the school, and did it.

And he was fired for being gay. For being who he was.

Wait, this sounds kind of familiar. Oh yeah, it’s because it happened last year ... at my high school.

Last April, at Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus, Ohio, physical education teacher Carla Hale was fired after an anonymous parent tipped off the Diocese that Hale had written in her mother’s obituary that Hale was living with her partner.

As a community, we stormed the media. We had every major outlet in Columbus pick up the story. Then it worked its way up the ranks.

Jezebel. The Huffington Post. NBC Nightly News.

Soon enough, we had the entire nation shaming the Diocese of Columbus for its heinous lack of compassion and tolerance, an interesting twist of irony considering the very institution we were shaming was a church.

But nothing changed. Hale never got her job back.

If that doesn’t cause a twisted knot to grow in your heart, then you need to reconsider your moral values.

This is my last opinion column for the semester, and I wanted to give one last opinion, one that would resonate.

So it’s this: embrace one another. Be good to one other. But above all, be tolerant of one another.

I don’t care if you’re gay. I don’t care if you’re straight. But I do care if you think differently of someone simply because they were born to be sexually attracted to a different gender than you.

Or if they are a different color. Or of a different culture. Or of a different religion.

Fire teachers because they’re bad teachers. Fire teachers because they committed a crime.

Don’t fire teachers because they’re gay. I don’t care if Holy Ghost is a Catholic institution, and because of that, being gay goes against its moral code. This is 2013, where we can hopefully rise above silly archaic rules and rituals of bigots bygone.

Sharing the one love we have as a human race to each and every person, regardless of how they were born, is a necessity.

Nelson Mandela said, “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

No matter what newsroom I’m in, I’m never going to stop writing to fight for every man, woman and child to be treated as an equal citizen of the world.

With that, I bid you all farewell, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading my work this past semester.

­— ihajinaz@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Ike Hajinazarian on Twitter @_IkeHaji.