Sarah Morse, who is a U.S. citizen and a Catholic, spent years teaching history at Arbroath High School in Scotland. EWTN News reports she was reportedly dismissed without due process for simply answering a student's question about her personal pro-life views.
When answering the question, Morse said that she was against abortion, calling herself “a faithful Roman Catholic.” She claimed that at no point did she try to convince her students to adopt her worldview.
Now, she is taking the high school to court because of discrimination claims. She called this situation a "terrifying precedent for the teaching profession in Scotland."
Frank Pavone of Priests for Life talked about this on American Family Radio with the "Jenna Ellis in the Morning" program. He used this event to discuss the broader erosion of religious liberty and free speech across Western nations.
Pavone also argued that framing abortion purely as a subjective "religious belief" or a matter requiring "impartiality" is a tactical mistake. Instead, he said that abortion is an empirical, factual matter concerning the destruction of human life.
"God bless her for expressing her faith, but answering the question about abortion goes way beyond whether you're a Catholic or not, even whether you're a Christian or not,” says Pavone. “It goes down to whether you're a human being or not. We're talking about the killing of babies, and that's not a belief. That's a matter of fact."
Drawing parallels to teaching history and enforcing fundamental laws (like prohibition of theft), he emphasized that society cannot remain "impartial" on whether the strong are permitted to kill the weak.
"Must the innocent be protected or can they be killed? Can the strong kill the weak? Because that's the difference between — the way you answer that is the difference between civilization itself and barbarity, which just leads to chaos," Pavone says.
When it comes to issues of free speech and government censorship, Pavone said it is not the role of government to tell someone what speech is true or not. Instead, he said that the government’s role is "to protect your right both to believe and to articulate what you think is true and let the battle of ideas go on."
