Steph Lentz was sacked this year for being gay. It was perfectly legal – Sydney Morning Herald

Steph Lentz won’t be going to heaven. At least that’s what the Covenant Christian School told her in December as it prepared to sack her after she came out as lesbian.

Lentz was a devoted English teacher at one of Australia’s growing number of small, low-fee Christian schools, and hers is just one of many stories of discrimination against LGBTQ teachers dismissed or pushed out of their jobs, or pressured to remain silent about their sexuality by school policies and employment contracts.

Her sacking was perfectly legal under state and federal laws, which give religious organisations including government-funded evangelical schools exemption from anti-discrimination legislation.

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But as the federal government prepares to introduce the third draft of its contentious Religious Discrimination Bill to Parliament later this year, LGBTQ staff and students fear yet worse treatment.

“Australian law already allows the kind of discrimination that got me sacked for what I believe and who I am,” says Lentz, who has gone public for the first time about her dismissal from Covenant in Sydney’s north-east.

“The new bill will only reinforce that religious schools can continue to discriminate with outdated, stagnant views and processes.”

Questions of sexuality

Evangelical schools, many based in outer suburban and regional areas, employ tens of thousands of people, and educate hundreds of thousands of children in Australia. They tend to charge low fees (usually less than $10,000 a year) and are heavily reliant on taxpayer funding. Governments in turn rely on them to relieve pressure on the public system in outlying areas.

Lentz, 30, fitted in perfectly. Or so it seemed. She had grown up in a conservative Protestant community and in 2017 became a valued staff member at the school in Belrose, which relies on government money for almost half its funding.

She married at 23 and considered children but for years endured internal struggles over her same-sex attraction. “Because of my strong commitment to Christianity and its doctrines, I suppressed that part of myself, believing it was wrong,” she says now.

Then she took a soul-searching year off work in 2020 and, “I came out to myself for the first time in a real way”.

Now divorced, Lentz left her deeply conservative church and joined a new evangelical community with a more “affirming” attitude to homosexuality. In the spirit of honesty, she wrote to her school to explain she was gay but that she had reconciled her Christian faith and her sexuality. She assured the school’s leaders she could continue to be a dedicated Christian teacher. Should questions about sexuality arise in class, she would present the school’s strong convictions while acknowledging that some Christians hold different views.

Shortly afterwards, in a confidential letter last December, the school praised Lentz for her passionate Christian teaching but noted she had failed to affirm the school’s Statement of Belief, including the “immorality” of homosexuality.

In another “confidential” letter in January, Lentz was dismissed. Her beliefs, the letter said, were no longer consistent with the school’s.

‘A rallying cry’ for conservatives

“This is a systemic issue not isolated to one school,” says David Patterson.

Patterson, now a committee member at Flinders Christian Community College south-east of Melbourne, has seen the issue from within. He has been a youth worker, pastor and finance manager within Christian Schools Australia, a network of 132 mostly low-fee religious schools. A sense of justice has prompted him to speak out for the first time after watching Christian friends struggle with their sexuality.

“There’s too much pain, and too many lives are being negatively impacted,” says Patterson, who is not LGBTQ.

“I’m from South Africa. This is what apartheid was – it allows you to be discriminated against with a legal basis.”

Patterson and Lentz say many schools began taking a harder line against people’s sexuality after the same-sex marriage debate in 2017.

It and the “religious freedom” debate that followed focused the attention of some institutions on the sexuality of employees. Some schools, they said, had since reworked policy documents and employment contracts to require staff to adhere to strict moral codes.

“It [discrimination based on sexuality] was made a central issue and it’s been given a deep sense of legality. It’s a rallying cry. We’re using the vulnerable as a point of unity,” Patterson says.

“This discrimination is being funded by the taxpayer in the 21st century when broader society has said ‘this is not acceptable’.”

Multiple teachers interviewed by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, speaking mostly on the basis of anonymity to preserve their employment, say they too have observed or been personally subject to discrimination because of their sexuality.

Patterson says discriminatory policies and clauses are often hidden in “values” statements, employment contracts or job interview questions because school leaders “lack the courage to be transparent, knowing that their position is indefensible to the wider school community and general public”.

The 2019 constitution of Crest Education, which takes in Rivercrest and Hillcrest campuses in Melbourne’s far south-east teaching 1700 students and employing 256 staff, says “homosexual activity” is “unprofessional” conduct along with “unlawful sexual activity including grooming”. The schools are 56 per cent government funded.

A leaked administrative policy from the Hillcrest campus warns “such behaviour will result in the College taking disciplinary action which may involve termination of employment”.

The school did not respond to a request for comment.

Christian Schools Australia’s public policy director Mark Spencer says it is vital that schools of all faiths remain “true to their core vision and values”, and that choice and diversity are a key feature of the Australian education system.

In a statement to The Age and the Herald, Spencer says current exemptions to anti-discrimination law provide crucial protections for religious freedom.

“If parental choice is to remain a hallmark of Australian education, then the rights of school communities to operate in accordance with religious beliefs must be upheld.”

A ‘sword’, not just a ‘shield’

Opponents of the federal government’s proposed Religious Discrimination Bill, which Attorney-General Michaelia Cash plans to table this year, fear it could extend further the right to discriminate.

The bill will be the third draft of contentious legislation first flagged in 2017 by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to appease conservative Coalition MPs during the marriage equality debate.

Its new provisions are unclear, but the second draft strengthened the ability of doctors and other health professionals to refuse treatment to patients on religious grounds. It also restricted large employers from limiting what employees could say outside the course of their employment – the so-called Israel Folau clause – allowing people to make discriminatory “statements of belief” as long as they were made as good faith expressions of their religion.

“I don’t believe schools should be allowed to … teach those damaging things. There are queer kids there and they need role models.”

Teacher Steph Lentz

The bill also overrode existing federal and state anti-discrimination laws, to protect religious “statements of belief”.

Some religious conservatives have slammed the second draft as too weak, with Presbyterian moderator-general Peter Barnes dismissing it as “useless”. The Australian Christian Lobby is campaigning for a tougher bill that also overrides state laws such as Victoria’s ban on gay conversion therapy.

The legislation’s core idea of protecting people’s religious beliefs from discrimination in the same way that race, sex, disability and age are protected is likely to attract wide public support.

But a range of critics including businesses and unions, disability groups, LGBTQ advocates and some faith leaders say the bill will also allow people, citing their religion, to wield a discriminatory “sword” against others, not simply a “shield” to protect themselves from harm.

Government insiders say the Cash rewrite is likely to be less strident than her predecessor Christian Porter’s drafts, and will be aimed at winning over Coalition moderates and, maybe, an ALP opposition determined not to alienate religious voters at the 2022 election.

A growing band of Coalition MPs led by Queenslander Warren Entsch, Victorian Tim Wilson and West Australian Dean Smith have flagged the possibility of voting against the bill, which also faces crossbench hostility in the Senate.

Anna Brown, the chief executive of LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Australia, says the government should abandon the “deeply flawed” Religious Discrimination Bill and rework existing laws “to reflect 21st century community attitudes”.

“Teachers and students can be sacked and expelled by religious schools simply because of who they are or who they love,” she says. “Most Australians would be shocked and appalled to learn that these injustices can occur in Australia in 2021 under existing law.”

A shock meeting

When Sam Cairns was called to the vice-principal’s office at Flinders Christian Community College in Victoria she was expecting to discuss a new employment contract. Instead, she was dismissed on the spot for being gay.

“He [the vice-principal] sat there and stared at me and said, ‘I’ve been made aware of your choice of sexuality’,” Ms Cairns recalls being told in 2012.

“‘You do know that, because of this, we can’t have you working here. What sort of message would that send to our community?’ ”

Cairns was told to collect her belongings and leave the school that day.

She had spent much of her life at Flinders College, which has two campuses and is majority government-funded, as a student and then as a physical education teacher.

But something wasn’t right. “I was having heart palpitations,” she says. Then, after years of internal turmoil that damaged her health and led to stints in hospital, “I got to the point of thinking that maybe it’s my sexuality and I’ve been leading a double life”.

When the school dismissed her, Cairns says, she was full of shame and “absolutely distraught”. “It was really dehumanising. I just couldn’t fathom how it [knowledge of her sexuality] changed the perception of me.”

Flinders College executive principal Cameron Pearce refuses to comment on Cairns’ case because, he says, there are no records of it, and it was before his time as school leader. “It would be inappropriate to speculate on comments or actions that are claimed to have happened at the time.”

Flinders College’s official and public constitution dated 2017 describes de facto marriage and homosexual relationships as “a departure from God’s order”, but Pearce insists the school has recently removed that clause.

“Our community continues to evolve in response to broader social and community changes.”

The reworked constitution is not publicly accessible, nor would the school provide it to The Age and Herald.

Cairns is no longer Christian and now describes herself as “spiritual”. Almost a decade after she was sacked, she is working at the supportive Mentone Girls Grammar and feels strong enough to speak out publicly.

“I can’t fathom laws that tell you ‘You can’t be you’,” she says. “I can’t fathom that concept.”

A new start

Steph Lentz is now happily employed at another religious school in Sydney that she describes as affirming and supportive.

In December, before her dismissal, Covenant Christian School wrote to her explaining that Christianity had “foundational truths” and it was necessary teachers adhere to them because “a person’s salvation is at stake”. The letter references 1 Corinthians 6:9, which says “wrongdoers”(New International Version) including homosexuals, “will not inherit the Kingdom of God”.

Proponents of greater religious freedom argue that if people like Lentz disagree with such doctrine they can, as she has done, work elsewhere.

Christian Schools Australia’s Mark Spencer says parents will not have the same opportunities to send their children to faith-based schools of their choice “if employment or other policy constraints frustrate the establishment and operation of religious schools”. Teachers, in contrast, can work at a “multitude of other schools”, he says.

Lentz disagrees.

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“These religious schools want to be hermetically sealed places where they don’t have to engage with competing or alternative points of view, even if those points are grounded in excellent scholarship, evidence and compelling human experience.”

By locking LGBTQ people out, some religious schools are denying their students understanding of the real world, and maybe themselves as individuals, she says.

Lentz cites research into mental illness and suicide among teenagers in religious communities showing that demonising homosexuality is bad for mental health.

“I don’t believe schools should be allowed to maintain the right of people to teach those damaging things. There are queer kids there and they need role models,” she says.

“They can’t be what they can’t see.”

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