Is It Legal to Fire A Woman Because She Is Attractive to a Married Boss? Sadly, Yes.

(Melissa Nelson, fired for being attractive to her boss, a dentist named Dr. James Knight.)

A GOP candidate for governor in Mississippi—a married man— has barred a female reporter from covering his campaign.

“I put my wife and my Christian beliefs above anyone else’s feelings or opinions ... and I did not want there to be a perception that I was riding with another female and that something promiscuous was going on or anything like that.”

Such public piety sounds like the Ten Commandments-in-the-courthouse pronouncements of Roy Moore, who sought to date 14 year-old girls as a prosecutor.

It also sounds like this legal case: Nelson v. Knight. Melissa Nelson worked as a dental hygienist for Dr. James Knight. She was young and attractive—and worse, she caught the eye of her employer.

Quoting now from the court opinion:

“Dr. Knight … once told Nelson that if she saw his pants bulging, she would know her clothing was too revealing. On another occasion, Dr. Knight texted Nelson saying the shirt she had worn that day was too tight. After Nelson responded that she did not think he was being fair, Dr. Knight replied that it was a good thing Nelson did not wear tight pants too because then he would get it coming and going… Nelson recalls that Dr. Knight once texted her to ask how often she experienced an orgasm. Nelson did not answer the text.”

Ms. Nelson was fired after Dr. Knight’s wife found out about her husband’s straying eyes (and mind). A minister was called in to help break the painful news to Ms. Nelson that she was being fired because she was a threat to Dr. Knight’s marriage.

Ms. Nelson sued for sex discrimination. She said she was fired because she was an attractive female— by its terms, sex discrimination.

The Iowa Supreme Court disagreed: “So the question we must answer is … whether an employee who has not engaged in flirtatious conduct may be lawfully terminated simply because the boss views the employee as an irresistible attraction…. Usually our legal focus is on the employer’s motivation, not on whether the discharge in a broader sense is fair because the employee did something to ‘deserve it.’ Title VII and the Iowa Civil Rights Act are not general fairness laws, and an employer does not violate them by treating an employee unfairly so long as the employer does not engage in discrimination based upon the employee’s protected status.”

What the court did not say but clearly implied is that preserving marital fidelity is a defense for throwing an attractive woman out of work because she is the problem, not the lack of self-control of her employer.

The role of religious belief in making the Iowa and Mississippi situations seem okay are part of a larger phenomenon of making women legally inferior to men.