Christian employee sues L.A. County over a Pride flag outside the office
Eric Batman says seeing the flag violates his religious beliefs, but his employer won't let him work from home all month
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A Christian employee at the Los Angeles Department of Public Works is suing the department and L.A. County because they refused to give him a religious accommodation to work from home during Pride Month, which he requested because he didn’t want to look at the “Pride Progress Flag” outside the building.
Who knew you could find a snowflake in Los Angeles in the summer?
The Senior Civil Engineer, Eric Batman (yes, that’s his real name), said in a lawsuit filed this past March that he’s been working at the Public Works department for decades and he also has very strong beliefs about gay people. He can’t stop thinking about gay people. His sincerely held religious beliefs revolve extensively around his obsession with what gay people do in the bedroom.
In 2023, the County’s Board of Supervisors passed a motion saying Pride flags would be flown at all County departments in June in honor of Pride Month, something they continued to do in the years since. And all of it bothered Batman because acknowledging the reality that LGBTQ exist and shouldn’t be ashamed of that is something his religion doesn’t allow.
So he asked his superiors if he could work from home the entire month. In 2023, they didn’t mind because his office was under construction anyway. In 2024, he made a similar request, saying that walking past the Pride flag “would negatively impact my ability perform my work and would result in a hostile work environment.”
How would it affect his ability to do his work? He didn’t say. I have no clue how looking at a flag impacts anyone’s ability to oversee the county’s “flood control and stormwater capture facilities,” as Batman does.
How would it result in a hostile work environment? No one knows. It’s not like colleagues were treating him any differently.
Batman went on to say he needed to avoid the flag in order to “not have to deal with the undue additional mental stresses associated with the image presented by the pride flag.” Because Pride Month is all about honoring the sacrifices made by conservative Christians who have to co-exist with other people.
A County official said he could always use a different entrance. And because he said he was dealing with “mental stresses,” the official sent him a brochure to help him file the paperwork so he could get “confidential professional help at no cost.” (That may have been something the official had to send him since he cited having mental health issues.) But whatever he decided to do, his accommodation wasn’t going to be approved because this was clearly an unreasonable request.
That meant he had to work in the office in June and this forced him to “violate his sincerely held religious beliefs.”
How? WHO THE HELL KNOWS. But that is what he later said in the lawsuit.
In 2025, he made another request to work from home in June. This time, he explained in detail why the flag was offensive to him.
For example, the flag has different colors on it, which everyone knows is anti-Christian.
The flag has six colored stripes which stand for various expressions of sexuality that are sinful according to my religion. Being forced to participate in the County’s celebration of sinful sexuality by working under this flag and being forced to look at it in order to come to work violates my religious beliefs.
Again, those stripes do not require anyone to do anything. It’s like seeing a menorah; if that’s not your thing, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s not like everyone who passes by the flag has to perform at least three gay acts during work hours.
He also said Muslim employees were allowed to work from home during Ramadan, therefore he should be allowed to do it to avoid a flag. He also included a long list of Bible verses so that his superiors knew he was truly delusional.
This argument was somehow not convincing to anyone. The County offered to give him a more convenient parking space in June so he could avoid the main entrance and the flag. But he rejected that option so that he could keep whining about being persecuted. In fact, he claimed he was being told to use “separate but equal” facilities.
All of this, he says, has caused irreparable harm… even though he’s continued to work at the facility with no real change.
When the lawsuit was filed in March, Batman was represented by the right-wing group Liberty Counsel (the Kim Davis people), and almost immediately, they blew everything out of proportion in order to fundraise off of this.
Like this email in which they claimed the County was “declaring [Batman’s] Christian beliefs to be a mental illness.”
The County did not say Christianity was a “mental illness.” Batman said he was struggling with “mental stresses” and the County sent him resources to deal with it, as they should have.
Liberty Counsel lied about that, because their Christian faith teaches them lying is perfectly fine if it helps you con gullible people out of their money.
Days later, perhaps realizing they were onto something, they said Batman was being told to attend a “Soviet-style ‘reeducation camp’”…
Because I hate myself and get all of Liberty Counsel’s fundraising emails, I can tell you that, since March 19, I’ve received six separate emails demanding more money so that the group can fight those Los Angeles liberals who think Christians are mentally ill. Seriously. One of the email headlines? “LA to Christians: You’re mentally ill.” (That’s not what they said.)
There’s been no further movement on this case. No response from the County yet. No judge’s ruling. Which means Liberty Counsel will keep acting like this is a pressing issue.
But let’s be clear: A flag that’s up for a month, with a message that boils down to “inclusion,” isn’t infringing upon anyone’s religious beliefs. It’s not telling Christians they’re not welcome in the building. It’s not promoting one religion over another. It’s not promoting LGBTQ people over straight, cisgender people. It’s merely acknowledging the struggles that certain people have had to deal with and reminding them they, too, are a part of this community. (Even if they’re not truly welcome as they are in Batman’s bigoted church.)
The irony is impossible to ignore here. The reason we even honor Pride Month is because LGBTQ people have spent decades being told to hide who they are in part to avoid offending religious conservatives and their sensibilities. They’ve lost jobs, been rejected by their families, been kicked out of their churches, and been targeted by politicians eager to score points by turning them into villains. Yet Batman wants a court to believe he’s the real victim because he had to walk past a rainbow-colored flag on his way to work. A flag that—let’s be honest—no one really pays that much attention to in the first place. This isn’t persecution. This is a Christian man looking for a reason to be angry.
If your faith is endangered by fabric, maybe your God’s not as powerful as you imagine.
“LA to Christians: You’re mentally ill.”
I mean, if a piece of dyed cloth that isn't pushing an establishment of religion triggers you this much, I think that statement would be accurate had they actually made it.
For fuck's sake...
I wasn't always a liberal. I was a fundamentalist once. You know what I fucking did when I had to work with people who didn't believe what I believed?
My fucking job. Without bitching. Because I was a professional. Not a fucking whiny ass martyrbater.
"I'm oppressed because I'm not getting special treatment."
Seriously, has there ever been a case in the US of someone being discriminated just for being a Christian because it seems like all the times I hear about Christians being the victims, it's because of their shitty behavior and not for their beliefs.