NO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY FOR A HUNGRY CHILD

There was an amazing piece of news out of western Pennsylvania this week. You may have missed it because it happened the same day Angelina and Brad told us it was over; we process grief at different speeds. To fill you in: a school cafeteria worker quit her job when she had to deny a young boy a hot lunch because of a balance due on his account.

As reported by the Washington Post, Stacy Koltiska said she was working the cafeteria register at Wylandville Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Eighty Four, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. She said she will never forget the little boy’s eyes as he stood there with a tray of hot food. Due to a new school policy, the lunchroom staff is prohibited from giving hot lunches to anyone whose parents owed $25 of more for past meals. Because of the balance owed, Koltiska was duty bound by her work rules to deny him the hot lunch.

Under the policy, the parents will be charged $2.05 for their son’s meal, the one that Koltiska had to dump into the garbage. In lieu of hot food, the debtors’ child was handed a cold sandwich consisting of two slices of wheat bread and a single piece of what Koltiska called “government cheese.” So she quit, right then and there. She told the Post that her religious faith does not allow her to deny a hot meal to a hungry child. “As a Christian, I have an issue with this,” she explained. “It’s sinful and shameful is what it is.” She said she resigned out of a moral obligation. “God is love, and we should love one another and be kind,” Koltiska said. “There’s enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong.”

Shockingly, there has been radio silence over Koltiska’s plight on the part of the evangelical right and its “religious liberty movement”. I fully expected Kim Davis to show up with a picket sign. She’s the clerk of court in Rowan County Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because her religious beliefs outranked the law, or so she said. Davis did a few days in jail while relishing the martyr role and the army of Republican politicians who scrambled to her side for a photo op. This was the seminal event in a nation-wide push for legislation establishing the right to discriminate against the LGBT community on the basis of religious belief.

The argument is that people who sincerely hold religious convictions should get a pass whenever there is a conflict between the law and their faith. This has resulted in the passage of legislation in some states allowing florists, caterers and others to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding based on a religious opposition to same sex marriage. It also produced the Supreme Court decision in “Hobby Lobby”, where the justices said a business owner with a theological objection to birth control is free to remove contraception coverage from the company medical plan.

So why aren’t the religious liberty zealots expressing outrage over the school lunch dilemma? Granted, taking hot food away from a hungry child has nothing to do with birth control or the anti-gay agenda, but the religious principle could not be more directly applicable. Kim Davis became an overnight folk hero in some quarters when, as an elected official, she refused to issue gay couples the marriage licenses they were legally entitled to. Poor Stacy Koltiska, following a school board rule she abhorred, dumped the little boy’s lunch into the garbage, handed him a pathetic cheese sandwich and quit her job. Two women; the same God; two different conflicts between their faith and the law. One of them followed the law she disagreed with and then walked away, never to deny another child a hot meal. The other never followed the law, kept her job and went on a speaking tour with a hostile rant about “religious liberty”. Which of them went to a better place is unknown to all but God. But it’s a pretty easy guess.