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Okay...I have to be careful with this one.
Up until recently Stacie Halas was a middle school science teacher in Oxnard, California. And, for eight months in 2005, Stacie Halas made pornographic movies.
When administrators discovered her past, she was fired from her teaching job. Stacie sued to get her job back.
"We were hoping we could show you could overcome your past," said her lawyer Richard Schwab. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."
A three-judge commission put a stop to that dream.
"Although her pornography career has concluded," Judge Julie Cabos-Owen spoke for them all, "the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague."
Halas said she turned to porn while she was unemployed in 2005 to pay the bills. She did it for eight months and once she was otherwise employed, she quit.
Such a conundrum.
The past has long tentacles. My guess is that every single one of us could be precluded from something for something we did in the past were it to come to light. Remember the potential Supreme Court justice who had to take himself out of the running because years ago he had tried marijuana?
We lose a lot of good people because of how morally inflexible and unforgiving we can be.
I remember when I coached at the local high school back in the 1990s; there was a student that had aspirations for politics who dumped his girlfriend because she was smoking pot.
"I want to run for office some day," Nathan said. "And I don't want it to come out that I associated with someone who smoked pot."
Really? Moral paranoia starts young.
Alongside the Halas story was another I read last week. It was about someone who did do something illegal and did hurt someone.
He was at a party when he was sixteen years old and stole five gold rings from the home. Just recently, fifteen years later, he returned them anonymously, remorse finally getting the best of him. The family from whom he stole them forgives him completely-they are just glad to have the rings back.
I'll bet, too, given how we pick and choose our moralities, that he would have no problem getting and keeping a teaching job.
(By picking and choosing our moralities I mean we prioritize them strangely sometimes. Someone still has to explain to me why violence is more acceptable in movies for younger viewers than sex. I've never gotten that. Let me be clear, I'm not espousing sex for children, I just can't understand why murder and mayhem is more palatable to us.)
And, in our society, stealing seems much more forgivable than porn.
As for Halas, I'm not sure where I come down on whether she should be able to keep her job or not. The fact that she did porn isn't the issue to me-I don't care about that one bit.
But it would be tough to successfully sustain a teaching career with her students and colleagues having access to her porn, even though she quit. That's a difficult one.
On the other hand, maybe she should be given credit for not going on welfare and being a burden to society. That's something right?
Wherever one comes down on it, this much I know: If we can only hire and/or promote the perfect, we won't have any employees...or leaders.
And if you are perfect, well then warm up your arm...because he that is without sin should cast the first stone.
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