New York Times reports on a "wave of firings and forced resignations of gay men and lesbians” from Catholic schools around the country as the expansion of same-sex marriage collides with Catholic doctrine, which forbids homosexual unions. The freedom to discriminate against gay people in hiring is the second prong of the Catholic bishops’ 15-year effortto expand the definition of “religious liberty” to allow it to impose its religious precepts on others. 

To this end, the U.S. Catholic bishops have teamed up with the Knights of Columbus and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty to block the expansion of marriage equality in the states, push anti-gay marriage amendments, and seek constitutional protections for religious-based discrimination. The Becket Fund in particular has emerged as a powerhouse public interest law firm in pushing right-leaning definitions of religious liberty. It successfully argued the hugely influential Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court case that found a "ministerial exception" that can be used to exempt religious employers, such as Catholic schools, from anti-discrimination laws. 

Becket has been so key to the Catholic bishops’ efforts to gin up opposition to supposed affronts to religious liberty like the Obamacare contraception mandate that its general counsel Anthony Picarello left the firm in 2007 to head up the USCCB's “religious liberty” efforts. Its board of directors includes high-profile conservative Catholics like Princeton University natural law scholar Robert George and former Vatican ambassador Mary Ann Glendon. 

Becket actually filed the first lawsuits against the mandate on behalf of Belmont Abbey College, a Catholic institution, and Colorado Christian University, which is evangelical. It will argue the case for a broad exemption for any employer with moral objections to contraception—the bishops’ favored form of an exemption—when the Supreme Court hears the Hobby Lobby case this March. And it got a dramatic New Year’s Eve injunction against the mandate for the Little Sisters of the Poor, conveniently turning the order of humble, habited nuns who serve the elderly and poor into the poster children for the mandate’s supposed trampling of religious freedom. 

But with the Times reporting a backlash brewing among Catholics who don’t see how firing beloved teachers comports with Pope Francis’ “Who am I to judge?,” the bishops and their allies may have reached the limits of their PR battle for “liberty.”