Religious bias cost job, says teacher
In Sevier County, everyone noticed she was a coffee drinker. Co-workers looking for the sacred garments worn by church members never saw her wearing them.
Erin Jensen says those clues revealed she was not a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and led to even more talk about her beliefs.
“There were rumors around the community that I was a witch,” the former South Sevier High School teacher testified Wednesday.
The end of the hallway where she and another non-LDS teacher had classrooms was referred to by students as “Hell’s Corner.” Jensen testified she has no religion and has not been active in the LDS Church for more than 20 years.
Of course I had to keep an eye on this story. A lot of the elements sound very, very familiar, so although many things have changed in Salt Lake from what I went through in my teenage years there, much of the rest of the state is still in a weird time-warp all its own.
The detail that was most telling to me was “Hell’s Corner,” because when I was in high school nearly thirty years ago, I used to hang out with 2 non-religious teachers in our school’s version of “Hell’s Corner.” It had a knickname like that amongst the students, but basically it was a tiny hole-in-the-wall teacher’s lounge that contained that instrument of the Devil, a coffee pot. I had an hour of “released time,” which if I’d been a member of the dominant faith would have been spent in the off-campus classroom of the “Church” seminary building across the street. Can’t mix school and religion, you know, so “Church” classes had to be held off school property. That they had to be held at all, and that all students were assumed to need an hour of “released time” for these classes, was and is a source of continuing controversy in Utah.