The Black former tenured professor at Kentucky’s Lexington Theological Seminary who was fired amid economic calamity in 2009 and filed suit took his fight further last week when his case was argued before the seven-member Kentucky Supreme Court in Frankfort.
The case, Kirby v. Lexington Theological Seminary, turns on the application and scope of the so-called “ministerial exception” and, once it reached the state Supreme Court earlier this year, attracted briefs from national advocacy groups known for taking on legal matters of major consequence.
In its amicus curiae brief, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom called for absolute immunity for seminaries in these kinds of cases. In its amicus curiae brief in the related court case—Kant v. Lexington Theological Seminary—which involves the seminary’s only Jewish professor’s firing at the same time as Kirby’s, the Anti-Defamation League opposed the position of the seminary. Lawyers for that group questioned how a Jewish scholar who always held himself out as a non-adherent to the tenets of the seminary’s faith and taught courses such as “Jesus in Film,” could be denied his day in court as a ministerial employee.
“We are gratified that the Kentucky Supreme Court granted our Petition for Review filed last year and engaged in the challenging work of considering the limiting principles necessary in this First Amendment area,” said Amos Jones, an Assistant Professor of Law at Baptist-affiliated Campbell University in Raleigh, N.C., who argued for the plaintiff, Jimmy Kirby, of Lexington.
In his lawsuit, Kirby claims that he was wrongfully dismissed in 2009, as the seminary endured economic uncertainty. The seminary successfully argued that his firing was not challengeable because of the ministerial exception, first in Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington in 2009, and later in 2012 before the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which cited intervening precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States. The high court held in January 2012 that religious organizations can hire or fire certain kinds of employees without government review, for the first time recognizing an exception that had appeared in common law forty years earlier.
During the state Supreme Court hearing, the seven justices jousted with defense attorney Richard Griffith of Lexington, who said that the seminary is in fact independent of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) but nevertheless is entitled to the legal shield that the free-exercise clauses of the federal Constitution provide.
Jones argued that his client was not a ministerial employee as the Supreme Court has conceived of the new exception and that the dispute should be adjudicated based on contract principles and anti-discrimination statutes rather than being dismissed as too entangled with the internal affairs of a faith community.
