New Orleans teacher fired by Catholic school for being gay says ‘it's just time' for discrimination to stop

The Guardian

2 days ago

A longtime music teacher at a New Orleans-area Catholic school who was essentially fired for being listed in an obituary as another man's widower says he refused to suffer quietly because 'it's just time' for bullying and homophobic discrimination 'to stop'.
'If I can put this out there and bring attention to it and make it easier for some other young, gay educator to stand up to it – then, yeah, I'll do that,' Mark Richards told the radio show Talk Louisiana With Jim Engster on Tuesday. 'I have nothing to lose.
'Let's make some noise about it. That's exactly what I'm planning on doing and what I do.'
Richards's comments on the show aired by WRKF in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, about 60 miles west of New Orleans, added contours to a dismissal which was first covered locally but then gained international media attention as many in his community and beyond rallied to support him.
As the music teacher and band director has put it, he began working at St Francis Xavier school in Metairie, Louisiana, in 2003, two years after he embarked on a relationship with his future husband, John Messinger.
Richards's annually renewable employment contract at St Francis Xavier contained a morality clause prohibiting educators from entering into 'a marriage in violation of the rules of the Catholic church', 'actively engaging in homosexual activity' or engaging in other conduct that the document maintains conflicts with the teachings of a religion that does not permit same-sex matrimony within it.
The morality clause is required of all teachers at schools that are affiliated with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans, which St Francis is, though historically it has been selectively enforced.
Richards has said he signed the contract and morality clause because he never kept his being gay a secret and was offered the job anyway. Furthermore, when his husband died of a heart attack in September 2023 after about nine years of marriage to him, Richards counted on sympathy and support from many members of the St Francis community.
But then, in recent weeks, an evidently disgruntled parent complained to school and archdiocesan officials that Messinger's obituary – published nearly two years earlier – listed Richards as his husband. And on 25 June, as Richards told Engster, the school informed him that it would not renew his employment contract, accusing him of having lied about his lifestyle on previous occasions that he had signed the agreement.
Richards, who described being barred from learning the identity of the complaining parent or viewing the complaint itself, soon sent an email to members of the St Francis community sharing the word about his plight. Parents soon organized a petition urging the archdiocese to revisit its firing of Richards, whom the document exalted as 'a beacon of kindness and understanding' in the lives of thousands of students over the years.
The change.org petition had garnered more than 4,500 signatures as of Wednesday. Nonetheless, in an email to the St Francis community, school officials declared: 'This decision is final and will not be revisited.'
That posture has not gone over well with many in and around St Francis. One of the more typical comments on the petition referred to Richards's dismissal as 'a discriminatory, unkind and intolerant move'.
In fact, Richards's treatment at the hands of St Francis contrasted sharply with how past top figures at the church attached to the school lobbied key Louisiana officials to release a priest who had been convicted of raping a child from a sentence of life imprisonment on medical compassion grounds.
The campaign helmed by St Francis's pastor at the time, Andrew Taormina, who has since retired, relied on help from an attorney named VM Wheeler III. Wheeler would eventually be himself convicted of molesting a child – an act of abuse that occurred years before, though not reported to authorities until after the lawyer joined New Orleans' Catholic clergy as a deacon. The campaign, however, failed. Robert Melancon died in prison. And Wheeler later died while on both probation and Louisiana's sex offender registry.
Melancon's death in November 2018, coincidentally, came three days after the New Orleans archdiocese published a list of priests and deacons faced with credible accusations of child molestation. Less than two years after that disclosure, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection, a proceeding that remained unresolved as of Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Richards suggested to Engster that he understood his legal options were limited given that he was between contracts when his employment went unrenewed.
Engster also alluded to a federal fourth circuit court of appeals decision that upheld a ruling siding with a North Carolina Catholic high school that fired a gay teacher for announcing plans to marry his partner.
Richards said he considered his time at St Francis over, though the Mississippi native had still spoken to an attorney as he explored if there was anything he could do to compel his ex-employers to eliminate the morality clause that cost him his career at the school.
'I don't think it fits,' said Richards, who expressed a wish to somehow 'stop' the 'bullying and discrimination' that he had endured while growing up gay in the infamously conservative southern US.
Richards said a public school system in Mississippi had since encouraged him to apply for a job there, citing a shortage of music teachers. 'I don't think finding a job will be too much of a problem, I hope – I pray,' Richards remarked.
Whatever happens from here, he said he appreciates how some community members have tried to aid him, especially as he continues grieving his husband daily.
'I'm hanging in there pretty good,' Richards told Engster. But 'every day is an adjustment'.