Case 9.1: Unprofessional Conduct?
TEACHING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN with intellectual disabilities requires skill,
patience, and devo-tion, and those who undertake this task are among the unsung heroes of our
society. Their difficult and challeng-ing work rarely brings the prestige or financial rewards it
deserves. Mrs. Pettit was one of those dedicated teachers. Licensed to teach in California, she
had been working with mentally challenged children for over thirteen years when her career
came to an abrupt end. Throughout that career, her competence was never questioned, and the
evaluations of her school principal were always positive. Teaching was not Pettit’s only interest,
however. She and her husband viewed with favor various “nonconventional sexual life-styles,”
including “wife swapping.” Because so-called sexual liberation was a hot topic at the time, the
Pettits were invited to discuss their ideas on two local television shows. Although they wore
disguises, at least one fellow teacher recognized them and discussed Mrs. Pettit’s views with
colleagues. A year later Pettit, then forty-eight years old, and her husband joined “The
Swingers,” a private club in Los Angeles that sponsored parties intended to promote diverse
sexual activities among its mem-bers. An undercover police officer, Sergeant Berk, visited one of
those parties at a private residence. Amid a welter of sexual activity, he observed Mrs. Pettit
perform fellatio on three different men in a one-hour period.Pettit was arrested and charged with
oral copulation, which at the time contravened the California Penal Code (although now it does
only if one of the parties is under eight-een). After a plea bargain was arranged, she pleaded
guilty to the misdemeanor of outraging public decency and paid a fine. The school district
renewed her teaching contract the next academic year, but two years later, disciplinary
proceedings were initiated against her. The State Board of Education found no reason to
complain about her services as a teacher, and it conceded that she was unlikely to repeat her
sexual miscon-duct. But the Board revoked her elementary school life diploma—that is, her
license to teach—on the ground that by engaging in immoral and unprofessional conduct at the
party, she had demonstrated that she was unfit to teach.
Pettit fought the loss of her license all the way to the California Supreme Court, which upheld
the decision of the Board of Education. 116 In an earlier case, the court had reversed the firing of
a public school teacher for unspecified homosexual conduct, concluding that a teacher’s actions
could not consti-tute “immoral or unprofessional conduct” or “moral turpitude” unless there was
clear evidence of unfitness to teach. But Pettit’s case was different, the court hastened to explain.
The conduct in the earlier case had not been criminal, oral copulation had not been involved, and
the conduct had been private. Further, in that case the Board had acted with insuffi-cient
evidence of unfitness to teach; by contrast, three school administrators had testified that in their
opinion, Pettit’s con-duct proved her unfit to teach. These experts worried that she would inject
her views of sexual morality into the classroom, and they doubted that she could act as a moral
example to the children she taught. Yet teachers, the court reaffirmed, are supposed to serve as
exemplars, and the Education Code makes it a statutory duty of teachers to “endeavor to impress
upon the minds of the pupils the principles of morality . . . and to instruct them in manners and
morals. “In a vigorous dissent, Justice Tobringer rejected the opin-ion of the majority, arguing
that no evidence had established that Pettit was not fit to teach. The three experts didn’t consider
her record; they couldn’t point to any past miscon-duct with students, nor did they suggest any
reason to antici-pate future problems. They simply assumed that the fact of her sexual acts at the
“swingers” party itself demonstrated that she would be unable to set a proper example or to teach
her pupils moral principles.Such an attitude is unrealistic, Tobringer argued, when studies show
that 75 to 80 percent of the women of Pettit’s educational level and age range engage in oral
copulation. The majority opinion “is blind to the reality of sexual behavior” and unrealistically
assumes that “teachers in their private lives should exemplify Victorian principles of sexual
morality.” Pettit’s actions were private and could not have affected her teaching ability. Had
there not been clandestine surveillance of the party, the whole issue would never have arisen.
Case 8.4: Have Gun, Will Travel…to Work
ORGANIZATIONAL THEORISTS AND EMPLOYEE advocates frequently emphasize the
importance, from both a moral and a practical point of view, of companies’ respecting the rights
of their employees. Many employees spend long hours at work and remain tethered to the job by
phone or computer even when they are off-site; not just their careers but also their friendships,
social identity, and emotional lives are tied up with their work. All the more reason, it seems,
that companies should recognize and respect their moral, political, and legal rights. But
enshrined in our Constitution is one right that frequently gets overlooked in discussions of the
workplace: the right to bear arms.
In 2002 Weyerhaeuser, the Seattle-based timber-products company, fired several employees at
an Oklahoma plant who were discovered to have violated company policy by keeping guns in
their vehicles. Their dismissal provoked a response from the National Rifle Association (NRA)
and other gun-rights advo-cates, which since then have been lobbying for legislation that would
make it illegal for companies to bar employees from leav-ing guns in their cars in company
parking lots. Although no state requires companies to allow workers to carry weapons into the
workplace, four states have passed laws guaranteeing them the right to keep guns in their cars,
and several other states are weighing whether to follow suit. Gun advocates argue that licensed
gun owners should have access to their weapons in case they need them on the trek to and from
work. If an employer can ban guns from workers’ cars, “it would be a wrecking ball to the
Second Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution, says Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of
the NRA.
Brian Siebel, a senior attorney at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, thinks otherwise.
He sees these laws as “a systematic attempt to force guns into every nook and cranny in society
and prohibit anyone, whether it’s private employers or college campuses . . . from barring guns
from their premises.” But that’s not how UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh looks at it. “It’s
part of the general movement,” he says, “to allow people to have guns for self-defense not only
at home, but in public places where they’re most likely needed.” For his part, LaPierre of the
NRA contends that the legal right of people to have guns for personal protection is largely
nullified if employers can ban guns from the parking lot. “Saying you can protect yourself with a
firearm when you get off work late at night,” he argues, “is meaningless if you can’t keep it in
the trunk of your car when you’re at work.”
Interpreting the somewhat ambiguous language of the Second Amendment is not easy. It only
says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the
people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” All jurists agree, however, that the Second
Amendment does not make all forms of gun control unconstitutional and that, like the rest of the
Bill of Rights, it places restrictions only on what government, not private parties, may do.In
particular, the Second Amendment does not give gun owners a constitutionally protected right to
carry their weapons onto somebody else’s private property against the wishes of the owner. “If I
said to somebody, ‘You can’t bring your gun into my house,’ that person’s rights would not be
violated,” explains Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor. For this reason, the American Bar
Association sides with business owners and endorses “the traditional property rights of private
employers and other private property own-ers to exclude” people with firearms. Steve Halverson,
pres-ident of a Jacksonville, Florida, construction company agrees that business owners should
be allowed to decide whether to allow weapons in their parking lots. “The larger issue is property
rights,” he says, “and whether you as a homeowner and I as a business owner ought to have the
right to say what comes onto our property.” However, Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley, a
Republican sponsor of legislation requiring that guns be allowed in company parking lots, begs
to differ. “I respect property and business rights,” he says. “But I also think that some issues need
to overshadow this. . . . We have a right to keep and bear arms.” Other gun advocates think that
the property-rights argument is a red herring. Corporations are not individuals, they argue, but
artificial legal entities, whose “rights” are entirely at the discretion of the state. What’s really
going on, they think, is that some companies have an anti-gun politi-cal agenda.Property rights,
however, aren’t the only thing that compa-nies are concerned about. Business and other
organizations have a widely acknowledged duty to keep their workplaces—and their
employees—as safe as possible, and that means, many of them believe, keeping their campuses
free of weap-ons. There are more than five hundred workplace homicides per year; in addition,
1.5 million employees are assaulted at work, many of them by coworkers or former employees.
Having guns anywhere in the vicinity, many employers worry, can only make volatile situations
more deadly. “There’s no need to allow guns [into] parking lots,” says the Brady Center’s Siebel.
“The increased risks are obvious.” Steve Halveson drives that point home, too. “I object to
anyone telling me that we can’t . . . take steps necessary to protect our employees.” For him it’s
no different from banning guns from his construc-tion sites or requiring workers to wear hard
hats. “The context is worker safety, and that’s why it’s important.”
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