Louisiana Pastor Fired for Refusing to Use Co-Worker’s Pronouns
Luke Ash, a Baptist pastor who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, says he was fired after refusing to use a trans co-worker's preferred pronouns.
Pastor Luke Ash – Photo: YouTube, Tony Perkins Channel
Luke Ash, lead pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, says he was fired from his job as a library technician at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library after refusing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns. He was reportedly dismissed after referring to the colleague by female pronouns during a July 7 conversation with another library employee.
“That co-worker corrected me, said that the person she was training preferred to be called ‘he,’ and I refused to use those preferred pronouns,” Ash told anti-LGBTQ activist and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins during an interview on the conservative Christian political show Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.
“The next day, I was reprimanded by my supervisor and the head of reference, and on Thursday morning, July 9, I was fired for it,” he added.
Ash says his manager gave him a copy of the library’s inclusivity policy and told him they would figure out how to move forward. He maintained that he would not use preferred pronouns because of his religious belief that gender cannot change and that sex is fixed at birth.
“I’m not going to lie, I cannot do it,” he told Perkins. Speaking to Baton Rouge ABC affiliate WBRZ, Ash added, “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 acknowledged that by refusing to use his co-worker’s preferred pronouns, he was violating the library’s code of conduct, which says the library must provide an atmosphere where all employees are welcomed, accepted, and respected. The policy also states that employees have the right to be referred to by their proper pronouns.
“[There’s] no malice in my heart, I just refuse to use the preferred pronouns,” Ash told WBRZ.
Logan Wolf, a board member of Forum for Equality, Louisiana’s statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, defended the library’s decision.
“You just have to treat someone with basic decency, and I think that’s at the crux here,” Wolf told WBRZ. “This person willingly violated the library’s policies toward another employee, and I think that’s not okay. He’s doing this because he wants to be aggrieved, instead of actually being aggrieved, and it’s just not right.”
Author and blogger Hemant Mehta noted in his Friendly Atheist Substack that a host of right-wing figures are portraying Ash’s firing as yet another example of alleged “persecution” of Christians for their religious beliefs — claims that often coincide with calls to restrict LGBTQ rights and visibility.
In a post on X, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill criticized the library. “Louisiana isn’t New York or California,” she wrote. “State law prohibits discrimination based on religion in the workplace, especially as a public employee in a taxpayer-funded public library. In Louisiana — Christians have rights just like everyone else.”
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry piled on, adding, “Louisianans should never lose their job because they refuse to lie! Louisiana is the real world, and in the real world, preferred pronouns don’t exist — only biological ones!”
The anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok — the account to which Murrill and Landry were replying — demanded that Ash be reinstated or that the library be defunded.
It is unclear how federal law applies to this case. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that transgender employees are protected from discrimination based on gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Conservatives have denounced the ruling and continue to pursue cases aimed at overturning it or narrowing its impact, arguing that it infringes on the “religious freedom” of anti-LGBTQ Christians.
So far, neither Ash nor anyone else has filed a lawsuit challenging his dismissal. Mehta speculates that Ash might eventually sue and even suggests he may have taken the library job intending to challenge its inclusivity policies.
“There’s an easy way to describe what happened to Ash: He was disrespecting one of his co-workers, then got fired after insisting he wouldn’t stop belittling them,” Mehta wrote in Friendly Atheist. “He was warned about the consequences, didn’t give a damn about them, then lost his job. As he deserved.
“Like bigoted bakers and florists before him, Ash is pretending he was punished because of his sincerely held religious beliefs… as if being a perpetual asshole at work is one of Jesus’ most important demands. No matter how hard he tries to pretend to be a victim, he’s the bully. … He wasn’t fired because of his beliefs; he was fired because he was — and promised to keep being — a horrible colleague.”
After removing all references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument website earlier this year, the National Park Service has now scrubbed mentions of bisexual people as well.
As first reported by transgender journalist Erin Reed on her Erin in the Morning Substack, the change occurred on July 10, when the homepage was updated to read, "Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal."
Subsequent pages, including the site's "History and Culture" section, were also altered to remove broader LGBTQ references. One now reads: "Stonewall was a milestone for gay and lesbian civil rights," whereas it previously noted that living "openly as a member of the Stonewall comunity was a violation of law."
A rainbow crosswalk mural in Delray Beach, Florida -- dedicated to the LGBTQ victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting -- was vandalized for the third time on June 17, when a man in a black pickup truck was caught on camera intentionally leaving tire marks across the paint.
Surveillance footage released by Delray Beach Police shows the driver waiting for another car to pass before spinning his wheels and speeding off, leaving black burn marks on the mural and surrounding rainbow crosswalks.
The video, released by Delray Beach Police, also shows the same truck returning to the intersection later and performing another burnout, continuing across the full length of the intersection.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a directive from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that prohibits transgender and nonbinary individuals from obtaining passports reflecting their gender identities.
Rubio's directive, issued in January, had instructed State Department staff to freeze all applications for passports with "X" gender markers or applications requesting changes to gender markers on existing passports.
Rubio also directed his subordinate to enforce a section of the Immigration and Nationalist Act that allows the United States to refuse entry to any visa applicant who commits identity fraud or misrepresents who they are, with particular focus on transgender athletes from foreign countries.
These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet it’s crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So won’t you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each week’s magazine (and an archive), access to our Member's Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!
You must be logged in to post a comment.