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Belmont University, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, was shocked! shocked! to discover that its women’s soccer coach was a lesbian whose life partner was pregnant with the couple’s first child. On hearing news of this family’s scheduled delivery of joy, Belmont did what any purveyor of Christian love and charity would do: It told coach Lisa Howe to pack her crap and leave the campus forever.

Apparently, Howe—who’d previously earned administration kudos for upping the soccer program’s performance and its kids’ grades—announced to her players that she and her partner were expecting a baby. When word of her gayness filtered up to the college overseers, she was let go. The university, for its part, is saying Howe’s departure was mutually decided, but Howe—who’s hired a lawyer—and her players tell a different story:

According to Belmont’s mission statement, “Faculty, administration and staff uphold Jesus as the Christ and as the measure for all things.” Translation: Personnel can’t be Jewish, Muslim, or anything else non-Christian. Including, apparently, lesbian or gay. That’s a standard deal at many Christian secondary schools and higher-learning institutions, which can fire their employees for “immoral conduct.” But that practice seems to be at odds with this other passage from the school’s mission statement:

Belmont University welcomes men and women from diverse backgrounds. The university upholds the dignity of all and fosters an atmosphere of respect for the civil expression of divergent perspectives that enables students to learn, live, work and socialize together.

Belmont’s also got a pretty exhaustive sexual harassment policy (PDF), which Howe and her attorney are hopefully poring over:

Sexual harassment occurs when unwanted attention of a sexual nature interferes with a person’s ability to obtain an education, work or participate in recreational or social activities at Belmont University…It blurs the boundary between professional and personal relationships by introducing a conflicting personal element into what should be a professional situation.

Belmont’s got some ‘splainin’ to do. On the one hand, they want to celebrate diversity, as well as to prevent staffers from feeling persecuted by making a professional issue of their personal sexuality. On the other hand, they want moral staffers! And that means they want to know how you use your gonads!

Sound glib? perhaps. But notwithstanding the dictates of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Christianity as it’s practiced by a certain offshoot of Southern evangelicals, more and more Americans are getting smart to the idea that homosexuality is a poor measure of someone’s job fitness. (One of the university’s biggest donors has already called the firing an “injustice” that he hoped would be reversed.)

In a statement to the press, Howe herself expressed the hope that equality would catch on: