A bi-vocational pastor in Louisiana says he was fired from his second job as a librarian because he declined to use the preferred pronouns of a co-worker.
Luke Ash is the pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge and worked a second job at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library to support his wife and four children.
Ash appeared on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” to recount the ordeal, telling the host that he decided to take a job as a librarian after working as a truck driver.
“I thought that the library would be probably better for the hours so that I could give more of my time to the church and my family,” he said, adding that he and his family moved from Indiana about six months ago.
Ash explained that he was planning to keep his position long-term and saw it as a good “opportunity” to witness and be a light.
“Part of the job of a pastor is to disseminate information, and so I was going to still play a part of that in my tent-making job,” Ash explained. “Tent-making” is a term used by bi-vocational ministers, referring to the fact that the Apostle Paul mentions in the Bible that he had to work as a tent-maker to earn enough money to continue in ministry.
After four months working as an interdepartmental loan technician, Ash says he was reprimanded for not using the preferred pronouns of a transgender colleague during a conversation with another coworker.
“So, last Monday, July 7th, I was in a conversation with a co-worker about someone that she was training, and I did not use preferred pronouns in that conversation,” he recounted. “That co-worker corrected me (and) said that the person that she was training preferred to be called he. I refused to use those preferred pronouns.”
Ash continued, “The next day I was reprimanded by my supervisor and the head of reference, and Thursday morning I was fired.”
Despite being presented with the library’s “inclusivity policy,” the pastor said he could not lie. “That was the line for me.”
“I believe that there are religious convictions and there are other kinds of convictions, and when those things are in contradiction with each other, there has to be given preference for one or the other,” Ash told WBRZ.
(link: https://www.wbrz.com/news/man-says-he-was-fired-for-using-improper-pronouns-for-a-co-worker/)
Ash told Perkins that shortly after beginning to work at the library, he began to understand that it was not a place “hospitable for a Christian or even a conservatively minded person.” On multiple occasions, he heard colleagues disparaging books by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The pastor said that, for the most part, he “tried to do a good job and respect everybody that came my way.”
However, Ash explained that he drew the line at referring to his coworker by their preferred pronouns because his religious convictions matter.
“The library made their decision that they would rather have a difficult conversation with me than for a transgender person to hear something that they didn’t want to hear,” he said.
Meanwhile, Logan Wolf, a board member with Louisiana’s LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, defended the library staff’s decision. The Forum of Equality board member said, “This person willingly violated policies and procedures of the EBR library towards another employee, and I think that’s not okay.”
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