CHICAGO (CN) — The Moody Bible Institute went before the Seventh Circuit on Tuesday, urging the appellate panel to intervene on its behalf in a pending civil rights case.
That case is currently on hold in the Northern Illinois federal court district and pits Moody against one of its former teachers, a woman named Janay Garrick. The Institute hired her in 2014 but ultimately fired her in April 2017, citing differences between its interpretation of Christianity and Garrick's.
The Moody Bible Institute, its attorneys clarified in court filings and during Tuesday's arguments, adheres to a "complementarian" view of Christianity which holds that women cannot serve as priests or pastors. Garrick, by her own admission, holds "egalitarian" beliefs that there should be gender equality in church ministry.
"Because faculty members must 'annually confirm the doctrinal statement which includes the complementarian view of gender roles,' and because '[Garrick’s] view is different from that of Moody,' Moody could not 'give [Garrick] a contract for the next academic year,'" Moody stated in court documents.
But Garrick waved away claims of irreconcilable doctrinal disputes as pretextual. She sued the Institute in January 2018 on Title IX and VII claims, arguing she was fired in retaliation for speaking out against the Institute's discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ+ people and women, including herself.
She noted in her brief that the Moody administration's view of her began to sour in 2015, after she and a male colleague criticized what they saw as the school's anti-LGBTQ+ culture. She later helped a female student file a Title IX complaint against the school for excluding women from its Pastoral Ministry program, something she claimed also earned her the ire of Moody elders and contributed to the decision to fire her.
This schism complicated what was, on paper, the primary question before the Seventh Circuit panel on Tuesday: whether the appellate court even had jurisdiction to intervene in the pending district court case.
"Courts of appeals generally have jurisdiction to review only final decisions," Garrick stated in her brief. She argued the Seventh Circuit has authority to hear only " a narrow group" of interlocutory appeals, based on the "collateral-order doctrine," which holds that interlocutory appeals are only appropriate when parties risk losing their rights without immediate appellate action.
Moody echoed this in its own briefs, but from an opposing perspective.
"Under the collateral order doctrine, this court has jurisdiction over pre-trial orders resolving claims of right 'too important to be denied review and too independent' of the underlying action to wait until 'the whole case is adjudicated,'" it wrote.
On Tuesday, Moody's attorney Daniel Blomberg of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty argued the institute did have an issue too important for the Seventh Circuit to ignore: Without appellate action, he claimed, Garrick's case could threaten the First Amendment's "church autonomy doctrine," which allows for the self-governance of religious institutions.
He claimed most of Garrick's confrontations with Moody administrators only began in 2016 after she had publicly disagreed with its complementarian views on clerical gender roles. This, he argued, showed her grievances primarily arose from a religious dispute a protected from government interference by church autonomy doctrine.
To support his argument he cited the 2015 Seventh Circuit decision in the case McCarthy v. Fuller, which found that a pretrial order denying First Amendment protection for church autonomy is appealable under the collateral order doctrine.
"It's a church autonomy violation because it's requiring this court to inquire into religious beliefs about the composition of the clergy," Blomberg said.
But Garrick's own attorney Bradley Girard, of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that Moody had not sufficiently backed up its claim of "irreparable harm" to warrant interlocutory action. To accept their standard for harm, Girard claimed, would result in a logistical and philosophical nightmare for the appellate court system.
He cited the the Seventh Circuit's 2014 decision in the case Herx v. Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, in which the appellate panel decided to dismiss the Diocese's interlocutory appeal over a still-pending employment discrimination lawsuit brought by one of its female school teachers.
"If the category were, 'anytime that somebody alleged some irreparable harm from going forward,' what that would mean is there's an immediate right to appeal, that this court gets full briefing, has to go through everything in the district court, has to sift the facts, has to draw all of the inferences, and then decide only after all of that if there's appellate jurisdiction," Girard argued.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose representative Georgina Yeomans presented arguments on Tuesday, also agreed that the Seventh Circuit should wash its hands of the case. Yeomans echoed Garrick's assertion that several of her claims did not stem from disagreements over clerical gender equity, and reasonably could be heard by a lower court.
"There are a number of factual allegations that really do have nothing to do with a disagreement over doctrine," Yeomans told the panel, including "the allegation that Ms. Garrick was given a heavier workload than her male colleagues, the allegation that she wasn't given time off to pursue her terminal degree, the allegation that she was subject to peer review and her male colleagues were not."
Any factual dispute over this issue, Blomberg explained to the Barack Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge David Hamilton, "would need to be proven up in discovery."
But discovery is something Moody, with this appeal, hopes to avoid, Blomberg said, particularly after five years of protracted legal fights over the issue. The interlocutory filing stems from September 2021.
After filing her initial suit, Garrick amended her case in December 2018 to add religious discrimination claims, but then-U.S. District Judge John Lee dismissed these in September 2019. The Barack Obama appointee, since seated on the Seventh Circuit by Joe Biden, subsequently allowed Garrick's disparate treatment and retaliation claims from a second amended complaint to go forward in October 2020.
Moody filed its appeal almost a year later, and now hopes the Seventh Circuit will toss Garrick's remaining claims entirely.
The Seventh Circuit panel which heard the case, consisting of Hamilton and the Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judges Amy St. Eve and Michael Brennan, did not say when they intended to issue a ruling, nor how likely it was they would fulfill those hopes.
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