'Devout Christian' teacher sues children's center after being fired for refusing to read LGBT books to kids
STUDIO CITY, LOS ANGELES: A "devout Christian" California childcare teacher who refused to read books to children featuring same-sex couples due to religious obligations, sued her former employer last week after she was mistreated and fired from her post. Nelli Parisenkova worked at Bright Horizons Children's Center in Studio City for four years and looked after children aged five and younger, as per the complaint she filed in the Superior Court of California on Thursday, October 13. Parisenkova is represented by lawyers with the Thomas More Society.
The Bright Horizons Children's Center is the largest childcare company in the US and was founded in the year 1986. It employs more than 26,000 people and has hundreds of branches worldwide. According to the lawsuit, Parisenkova knew about LGBT-themed material at the child care's Studio City location but initially had not been required to read them. However, this situation changed in April this year when the director of the location, Katy Callas, created "an uncomfortable and hostile work environment" for Parisenkova after the former got to know about her religious objections to the material. This led to her termination, according to the complaint.
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The complaint also stated that reading such books to children "would violate her religious beliefs and constitute promotion of intimate relationships and choices that are contrary to the teachings of her faith." "Parisenkova formally requested a religious accommodation from Bright Horizons that aligned with her prior informally granted request. Bright Horizons responded by categorically denying the request," the suit said, which goes on to claim Bright Horizons "made no attempt whatsoever to determine whether a reasonable accommodation could be reached."
"Instead, Bright Horizons issued a counseling memo with false statements, terminated her life insurance benefits, required her to complete retraining in diversity issues, and encouraged her to resign her position," the suit alleged. "Ms Parisenkova could not return to work without an accommodation; so, Bright Horizons terminated her employment."
Bright Horizons is slapped with several charges by the suit which include unlawful retaliation, failure to prevent discrimination and harassment, religion-based harassment, wrongful termination, failure to accommodate, unlawful constructive discharge and disparate treatment.
The childcare company has been one of the biggest supporters of the LGBT community and even documented in 2018, that its centers celebrated LGBT History Month by participating in Pride parades and reading LGBT-themed books to children. The organization also endorsed the Equality Act in the next year which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to federal antidiscrimination policy.
One of Parisenovka's lawyer and special counsel at the Thomas More Society, Paul Jonna described her client's case as "an outrageous example of religious discrimination." Jonna said Parisenovka "had been operating under the radar with an informal accommodation request for multiple years without notice," but that "as soon as upper-level management discovered her religious beliefs and received her formal accommodation request," Bright Horizons leveled against her "the full force of the company’s anti-religious and ironically ‘un-inclusive’ diversity policy."
"They tried to get her to quit through harassment and intimidation. When she couldn’t return to work because they denied her accommodation request, they fired her," Jonna added. "You can’t get much more discriminatory than that. It’s unethical, and it’s blatantly illegal." Jonna also claimed that when his client was called into Callas' office, the director "questioned her in an irate manner, told her that if she did not want to celebrate diversity this was not the place for her to work, gave her an administrative leave memo, escorted her outside with a security guard, and left her out in the 96-degree heat with no transportation."
Parisenovka reportedly suffered from heat exhaustion for the next couple of days after she had to walk 20 minutes in the scorching weather and waited 45 minutes for transportation.