Louisiana pastor fired from library job after insisting on misgendering colleague
Luke Ash got fired after breaking the library's code of conduct. Now he wants to play the victim and conservatives are eager to treat him like a martyr.
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There’s nothing conservative Christians love more than pretending to be martyrs, and the latest example of this is Luke Ash, a technician who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library in Louisiana until a couple of weeks ago.
The way he explains the story, he was having a conversation with a co-worker earlier this month about a new employee. That co-worker corrected Ash when he used the wrong pronouns to reference that person—“I refused to use those preferred pronouns,” he said. He was reprimanded by his boss the next day, maintained that he wouldn’t change his actions, and was then fired after that.
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. He was warned about the consequences, didn’t give a damn about them, then lost his job. As he deserved.
But that’s not how Christians are spinning this.
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. It’s irrelevant to him that he violated the code of conduct for employees that says the library is a place where everywhere is “welcomed, accepted, and respected” and that everyone has the right to be addressed by their pronouns.
"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 said.
No matter how hard he tries to pretend to be a victim, he’s the bully. He could, at the very least, just admit his religious convictions require him to treat certain people like shit instead of hiding behind his cloak of faith. He wasn’t fired because of his beliefs; he was fired because he was—and promised to keep being—a horrible colleague.
Ash actually had two jobs. In addition to his library gig, which he only had for six months, he’s the pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church, a job he’s held for an even shorter period of time. The church’s website says he began preaching there in March.
As soon as he got fired, though, he immediately ran to his conservative buddies like he was a football coach from Bremerton eager to make this story all about how he was persecuted.
It’s working, apparently. This has rapidly become a cause célèbre for conservatives.
Attorney General Liz Murrill chimed in, saying Louisiana “prohibits discrimination based on religion in the workplace.” But that’s a ridiculous thing to say. He wasn’t fired because of his faith; he was fired because of his actions. It’s the same reason a Christian hate-preacher in Oklahoma has not been fired from his government job yet! When he’s on the clock, he’s on his best behavior! Plus, you have to assume there are Christians who work in that library who still have their jobs because they don’t go around looking for ways to demonize their colleagues.
Governor Jeff Landry also added that “Louisianans should never lose their job because they refuse to lie!” That should be welcome advice for everyone at that library who secretly wanted to tell Luke Ash he’s an ash-hole.
Other right-wing trolls have jumped on the same bandwagon, pretending this violates some kind of religious freedom law that exists only in their broken brains. The American Spectator, for example, argued this isn’t about Ash’s lack of basic decency at all: “Basic decency would be for the trans individual to respect Luke Ash’s recognition that she is a woman and not a man.”
That includes hate-preacher Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who argued that the library offers grace to patrons but not to bigots:
It is somewhat ironic that the library has a policy not to fine patrons who do not return books on time or return them at all, yet they fire employees who refuse to engage in forced speech, and play along with a lie.
During our interview, Luke described how the library selectively restricts access to books they disagree with, while accusing others of “banning” books.
“They think it’s a sin to ban books,” he said, “but they in effect ban them by not buying them, or making them hard to find. If you can pretend a book doesn’t exist, that’s even more effective.”
Given how quickly this story has rocketed through conservative Christian circles, it seems almost tailor-made for this situation. I’ll admit my own conspiratorial thinking: Why did Ash even want a job at a public library? When the sort of people who believe there’s only one book that matters, and who also celebrate the mass layoffs of government employees, purposely get a job at a public library, it’s easy to believe Ash only applied to work there so he could eventually sue the library over its policies. As soon as he was fired, he immediately sat for an interview with Perkins, a fellow Louisianan with a massive megaphone. Within days, conservative pastors across the area wrote a letter to the library’s board demanding they gave Ash his job back and “change all DEI-directed policies that led to his termination.”
Perkins, by the way, invited Ash to attend a prayer event, which led to this wild picture of people putting their hands on him as if he had just suffered some kind of personal tragedy. No wonder the guy has a martyr complex.
But even if that’s all coincidental, the bottom line is that Ash broke the rules and deserved to be fired from a job he clearly didn’t even want (given the way he speaks about the library).
And while a more sympathetic “victim” would say he at least wants the library to succeed despite the way he was treated, Ash literally emailed the mayor of East Baton Rouge, Sid Edwards, to say he should consider defunding the library system.
I still believe that’s been his goal all along.
No right-wing group has filed a lawsuit against the library just yet, but when people like hate-evangelist Franklin Graham are urging them to do it, and when a top Department of Justice official implies this is all a travesty, it won’t be long before that happens.
Ash needs to take a step back and consider how her actions are hurting others. Maybe she can get some help from an organization that preaches how to be a good person.
What's that? Ash is male and Christian? Too bad I decided that I will call her a heathen, as MY religion says I have to.
There is absolutely nothing that cannot be, and has not been, justified in the name of a deeply held religious belief. Who gets to determine the sincerity of those beliefs? The person making the claim? What a can of worms that would be. Conservative Christians are the first people to claim they're being persecuted any time they are blocked from forcing their views on others. They are also the first people who would persecute others if given the chance.