The Trump administration has sided with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in its legal fight to fire employees who are in a same-sex marriage.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday issued a Statement of Interest in a case involving a teacher who alleges he was wrongfully terminated because he's married to a man.

Over the past year, the Archdiocese of Indianapolis has pressured Catholic schools to fire three gay, married employees. The archdiocese said that the employees' marriages were a violation of church doctrine.

In a lawsuit filed in July, Joshua Payne-Elliott claims that the archdiocese illegally interfered with his employment at Cathedral High School. Payne-Elliott has said that he never signed a contract that includes language that prohibits him from marrying a person of the same sex.

In its statement, the Justice Department states that courts “cannot second-guess how religious institutions interpret and apply their own religious laws.”

Payne-Elliott's lawyer, Kathleen DeLaney, told the Indianapolis Star that the Justice Department is arguing that the case is about religious liberty when it's not.

“Josh Payne-Elliott was employed by Cathedral High School,” DeLaney said. “Cathedral High School fired my client because the archdiocese told them to and threatened to take various actions against Cathedral if they refused to fire my client.”

“That is textbook intentional interference in an employment relationship. He was not employed by the archdiocese but the archdiocese had him fired,” she added.

Sasha Samberg-Champion, a civil rights lawyer, said in a tweet: “This isn't even [a] conventional employment discrimination case. Plaintiff alleges that archdiocese coerced his employer to break binding contract. Apparently the U.S. position now is that there's religious freedom from keeping your contractual promises!”

Steve Sanders, a constitutional law expert who teaches at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, said that the DOJ's move “appears to be more calculated to win favor with the president's base of religious conservatives than it does to seriously assist the court's adjudication of this case.”

One of the other two fired employees has filed a similar lawsuit and the other is expected to in the coming weeks, the Indianapolis Star reported.