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Witch Side is Right? Woman: Bath & Body Works Fired Me Over Pagan Holiday.

Posted by Raymond on December 13, 2009

From The Boston Herald:

A Connecticut Bath & Body Works staffer who practices witchcraft claims her boss put a hex on her career for using vacation time to attend Salem’s annual Halloween celebration.

Gina Uberti charges in a federal lawsuit that Bath & Body Works fired her after she took a week off around Halloween 2008 to mark the Wiccan holiday of Samhain.

“Any and all excuses offered by (Bath & Body Works) for the plaintiff’s termination are a pretext for the true reason – religious discrimination,” the East Haven, Conn., woman’s lawyer wrote in court papers.

Neither Uberti, her attorney or Bath & Body Works returned calls seeking comment on the case.

But in court filings, Uberti alleged that the chain canned her after eight years because she took time off for the holiday, also called “Witches’ New Year.”

Uberti, a Bath & Body Works district sales manager, claims she’d taken vacation around Samhain for years, but said her new supervisor flipped out when learning why.

[Read more at The Boston Herald]

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  • Gregory

    And nobody noticed all that time that she was riding a broom to work?

  • http://www.xenex.org/ xen

    Or that she stayed home when it rained for fear of melting?

    In fact, working at *Bath* & Body Works seems unnecessarily dangerous for her.

  • Tuna Ghost

    How long does a religion have to be around for people to start taking it seriously? If your religion isn't part of your culture, can it really be called “religion” these days? To my knowledge, there exists no tradition of paganism in the west older than a 100 years, since all the indeginous local religions eventually disappeared with teh onset of Christianity. So given that the modern brand of paganism hasn't been grown or developed within or alonside our culture, what exactly is it? Should it be treated like other more mainstream religions at all?

  • http://www.xenex.org/ xen

    Yes. Just because your religion was fabricated earlier, it is no more “valid”.

  • emperorreagan

    She was using time off to celebrate her belief system's holiday – not being asked to be excused for a holiday. To me, this story has less to do with religion and more to do with corporations encroaching on the way an individuals choose to use their free time.

    Also, you could make the same argument about various branches of mainstream religion. For evangelicals, prosperity preachers, etc., they basically abandon centuries of theological writings (the way Christianity has grown up alongside our culture), in favor of readings of the Bible completely unbound by tradition and flavored by the modern argument for biblical inerrancy. Neo-pagans have a longer history than the prosperity movement – so who should be treated as the nut proposing something out of the blue?

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/PDDVWRQVUPMKRGHURIEQVNYWHQ Sean

    yet mst christians vilify the romans and jews for using this line of reason

  • Tuna Ghost

    It's not the time of fabrication–or even the admittance (however reluctant) that it was indeed fabricated–that I see as a potential problem. As I noted earlier, it's the fact that it was not grown or developed within or alongside our culture.

  • Tuna Ghost

    Well, the certainly is an aspect of that. However, the reason given for the lawsuit is religious discrimination, and if the quote from her boss is accurate (or at least held to be accurate by her lawyer for use in court) then discrimination will likely be the main thrust of their case.

    To answer your last question first, I'm the last person to ask for an objective view on Prosperity Theology, having grown up in close proximity to the fuckers. I'll admit that if we use cultural relevancy as a yardstick, there are branches currently “aligned” with Christianity that would likely fall short. But even the strangest and smallest of the sects I ran into down south could trace their lineage back several hundred years, most of them to within a century of the reformation. Even if they've fudged their history, they're at least using their modern culture to retroactively “develop” their beliefs.

    Hmm. But I wonder if these pagan recreationists are actually doing the same thing.

  • Tuna Ghost

    Also, watch who you assign religions to. My “religion” involves a Greek deity that hasn't been worshipped in any organized fashion for probably 1500 years. My religion is probably even less a religion than modern paganism.

    …unless you were using “your” in the impersonal sense, in which case never-mind.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/PDDVWRQVUPMKRGHURIEQVNYWHQ Sean

    I am a modern pagan, most of the others that i know all want to get in touch with our own heritage
    before foreign invaders destroyed the local faiths and murdered it's priests.

  • http://www.xenex.org/ xen

    I was using “your” more generally, but I appreciate what you said. I
    honor and appease (she seems disinclined to worship) a goddess of chaos,
    which has earned me no end of Gardnarians looking down their noses at me
    while reenacting old Gerald's BDSM and pretending it extends into
    antiquity (which makes them no less more deserving of respect and
    official recognition than the dreidel spinners, Messiah cracker eaters,
    om hummers, or any of the others).

  • http://www.xenex.org/ xen

    The Wiccans I know are very much products and participants in American
    culture. Depending on how broadly we are including, some Wiccans/Pagans
    have influenced and innovated our national culture (I am thinking
    specifically of Jack Parsons, creator of rocket fuel and acolyte of
    Crowley). Given that some Wiccan dogma is liberally stolen from Native
    American religions without credit or context, I would be forced to
    consider them very American in an unfortunately pejorative way.
    I will grant, however, that I might be misinterpreting what you wrote.
    Would you care to clarify?

  • Tuna Ghost

    Hmm, I'm all for revitalizing lost cultures but is that even possible? Many of the pagans I know call themselves “recreationists” because they are attempting to recreate a belief structure that has long since died. Apparently, searching through Christian history has been the most efficient way of finding out what their ethnic ancestors believed and did, given Christianity's long history of appropriation. But I still wonder how successful that would be, even though in this case “successful” could be measured a few different ways.

  • Tuna Ghost

    Certainly! I'm a huge fan of Jack Parsons, by the way. Father of solid rocket fuels and didn't even have a chemistry degree from a University? Dude's got a crater on the moon named after him? Gotta love him. DId you know he got grifted by L. Ron Hubbard?

    Problem is, while Parsons' influence on rocketry and thus the space program and thus god knows what else had precious little to do with his paganism. If I understand his history correctly, his paganism was more or less a result (or maybe a symptom) of his interest in the occult, which is how I came to get involved with a deity as well. But throughout the last 1500 years or so of western culture, especially the last 500, one can trace changes in the mainstream religious beliefs as they coincide with the changes going on in the culture. Prevailing attitudes change, political climates change, technologies change, and the impact on religious beliefs (let alone religious structures!) change with them. I read Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels recently, which paints a picture of the formation of the early church being mostly inspired by organizational strcuture and political climates than truth value (surprise surprise), and that's just the first few centuries CE.

    I suppose one could say that the relatively recent trend towards paganism is a product of western culture, and as such is technically “home grown” despite being a fabrication. But the roots aren't there, and I've begun thinking of late that this is an important concept. Although I must concede you've actually made a good point when you say “I would be forced to consider them very American in an unfortunately pejorative way”. I suppose misappropriation is indeed a very American custom.

  • anon

    if they want to ressurect it they have to start somewhere.

  • http://www.bathandbodyworksprintablecoupons.com/ Garrett

    With the Bath & Body Works printable coupons it is a new generation in shopping. In days gone by people sat patiently waiting for the coupon supplement in our Sunday papers, or went through countless magazines hoping that there would be one or two coupons they would be able to use. Everyone collected coupons that were handed out in stores. Every woman had a large collection of coupons in her purse but when she wanted to buy a bottle of lotion or needed shampoo, she never had the perfect coupon. The coupon was for a different size or a certain fragrance, naturally not the one you wanted, but it was not for what you needed.

  • illiad

    Why not? Jehovah’s Witnesses have only been around for about a 100 years.

    The issue here is that it was a personal decision to fire her that was not based on merit.

  • illiad

    Why not? Jehovah's Witnesses have only been around for about a 100 years.

    The issue here is that it was a personal decision to fire her that was not based on merit.