A state court in Massachusetts has ruled that a Catholic preparatory school violated the state’s antidiscrimination law when it rescinded a job offer to a man because he was married to another man.

Matthew Barrett had accepted a job as Food Service Director at the Fontbonne Academy, a Catholic girls school. On his employment forms, he listed his husband as his emergency contact — a move that led the school to rescind the job offer. The Court’s reasoning was absurd, rejecting the schools’ expressive association argument in part because the school was “free” (for now, anyway) to explain that hiring Barrett was merely “involuntary compliance with civil law.”

By that standard, expressive association becomes meaningless. After all, if a court can jam Christian employers with employees who don’t share their values — and then contend that the employers’ rights are protected if they’re still free to complain about it — then the floodgates are open. Moreover, it’s disturbing to see a court substitute its own judgment for a Christian organization’s determination of what constitutes a “serious” burden on its religious expression. Even worse, the court held that even if the school could establish a serious burden on its expression, the state had a “compelling governmental interest” in eliminating discrimination, effectively crushing the school’s First Amendment rights.

Read the article “Bad News for Religious Liberty: Court Rules Christian School Has to Hire Man in Gay “Marriage”” on nationalreview.com.