Let me tell you, everyone. I am incredibly lucky where I am, with my friends and family and coworkers. They all accept me for who I am and what I am, even going out of their ways to make me feel comfortable -- while unnecessary, it is sweet, like Matt's Nana wanting to get me a card for Ostara while everyone else celebrates Pesach and Easter. :)
I'm not terribly open about my spirituality, though, as I never know how it will go. While I'm considerably further out of the broom closet than I ever have been in my entire life (it took me forever to come out to my own husband's family!), I still have a long way to go comparatively: I don't take off for my religious holidays, despite coworkers taking off for Good Friday and Yom Kippur; when people wish each other Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah, I rarely ever wish anyone a Blessed Yule; religious jewelry, books, and clothing are left for home and in circle, where others openly wear crucifixes and yarmulkes.
Granted, some of these bring those who are happy to ridicule you regardless of who you are, but the overall point is, some religions are still more widely accepted than others. In some places outside the US, like Africa, as MrsB has pointed out*, being called a witch -- even if the accusation is false -- can lead to torture and, ultimately, death.
Fortunately, those types of occurrences are few and far between in the US (especially since the Salem Witch Trials, which is another post in and of itself), but being a witch can still get you fired:
Carole Smith proudly acknowledges being a witch, a practitioner of Wicca, the pagan religion. She does have a broom, too, but just for show. Not all Wiccans use the word witch, but Smith and some others are reclaiming it as a term of respect, sometimes said to mean “wise woman.” She says she had told at least one person at work about her beliefs. But as for hexes, no, Smith said Wiccans don't go in for that sort of foolishness.
Carole Smith said she's never minded a bit of good-natured ribbing about witches. And two of her three cats are black. But she said the comments from TSA co-workers and supervisors were more akin to bullying, and made it harder for her to do her job in airport security.
“I was dumbfounded,” Smith said. “I told him, that's not what Wicca is. We don't cast spells. That's not witchcraft. That's black magic or voodoo or something else. To put a spell on a heater of a car, if I had that kind of power, I wouldn't be working for TSA. I would go buy lottery tickets and put a spell on the balls.”
The assistant director, Matthew W. Lloyd, testified later that he realized immediately there was no genuine threat of workplace violence. Smith hadn't followed anyone home — that's the only highway going toward her home from the airport. It was just a personality conflict made worse by fear of an unfamiliar religion.
He had a suggestion for Smith. She should enter into a formal mediation session with Bagnoli, her accuser, through the TSA's Integrated Conflict Management System, or ICMS. The mediation “would be a good venue to dispel any misconceptions” that her co-worker had about her religious beliefs, he told her.
“He wanted me to go to ICMS and sit down with Mary and explain my religion to her,” Smith said. “I'm like, 'No.' I refused to do that. It's not up to me to teach her my religion. I mean, would I have to go down and sit with her if I was Jewish?”
Twice, Smith left Lloyd’s office in tears and had to be coaxed back inside to continue the discussion. The assistant director testified later that he had not found her behavior to be insubordinate. But when Smith received her termination letter, there it was. The fact that she “left room twice and had to be instructed to return” was listed as one of the reasons justifying her firing.
Immediately after the complaint about casting spells, Smith’s personnel file started to bulge with disciplinary actions: A training coordinator wrote her up for having a negative attitude; a supervisor warned her for not properly checking a boarding pass; she was eight minutes late to work; she was accused of insubordinate behavior for yelling at supervisors when they told her she’d have to work a 16-hour shift because she was the only woman on duty to pat down female passengers. Before that, Smith was the closest to a model TSA employee as the government agency could find:
“She was in the top 10 percent in Albany at catching weapons on the X-ray machine. She passed her skills test on the first try. She caught a woman on her way to Vietnam with $30,000 in cash. And she didn’t mind working with the passengers — her training as a massage therapist kept her from being squeamish, as some officers were, about patting down elderly and special-needs passengers.”
*By the way, MrsB is currently running a series on 30 Days of Advocacy Against Witch-Hunts in Africa. Pop on over to check out her efforts and see how you can help out!
