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Following passage of this incredibly vague statute, I opined it was so loosely written that a company could be deemed to have violated the law by disciplining a minor executive for an alcoholic spouse’s behavior (breaking a precious vase, e.g.) at a cocktail party hosted at a CEO’s home.
Wait and see, I’ll turn out prescient before you know it.

Let’s be clear, the issue in the case at hand there was that the employee was late for work once due to her mentally-disabled daughter’s illness. For that, she was fired.

There is thus no dispute the employer was a low-life scumbag without a speck of human decency. I see absolutely no reason in law, policy, or politics why immunity should be granted for what was plainly associational discrimination: since there’s no chance the employer fires every employee who is ever late, the only reasonable inference is that the employer fired her because she has a mentally disabled daughter.

In Magnus v. St. Mark United Methodist Church, No. 10 C 380 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 19, 2010), an employee alleged that she was terminated because her daughter has various mental disabilities. The employee was late one day due to her daughter’s medical emergency, and the employee had previously protested weekend hours due to her need to care for her daughter.

The woman alleges that she was fired after being late only one time. She also states that she had protested working weekend hours. The woman works at a church. Generally, churches are open on weekends and services are held in many churches on both Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings.

From these posts, we don’t have the Church’s (employer’s) story and we don’t know what their reasons were for terminating the employee, only what the employee alleges in her lawsuit. One shouldn’t, therefore, automatically assume the employer is evil.

Then what should one assume? We are, after all, talking about a motion to dismiss, where all facts are assumed in favor of the plaintiff.

I’d love to hear the church’s explanation for firing her after being late once. I’m sure, after hours of instruction from their lawyer, they’ll come up with some half-baked, implausible defense, but the only facts we know speak for themselves.

Spare us all Max. Employers all over the nation are stuck with this horrific law and their employees milk it, just like the FMLA (known in employment law circles as the Friday Monday Leave Act). I’m sure the Church fired her after dealing with significant attendance issues, but that’s not what we’ll here in the press.

Max, the plaintiff may be prone to hysterical exaggeration. Lots of people, perhaps even some in this thread, are prone to hysterical exaggeration.

For instance:

There is thus no dispute the employer was a low-life scumbag without a speck of human decency.

is inconsistent with this:

We are, after all, talking about a motion to dismiss, where all facts are assumed in favor of the plaintiff.

is inconsistent with this, since as you know the church can’t explain at this point:

I’d love to hear the church’s explanation for firing her after being late once.

Just a thought, but what if the church fired her because it was the thousandth time she’d been late for work?

As someone who has had to deal with this more times than I can count, I will put money on it that they weren’t fired for being late one time. What normally happens is someone is late numerous times for whatever reason but then the “real” emergency comes up causing them to be late… again.

Unfortunately company policy doesn’t have different categories for real and non-real emergencies and the “real” one was the final straw, but this is the only one they they want to remember.