Pastor files discrimination lawsuit after losing library job over pronouns
Conservative activists turned Luke Ash into a martyr. Now he's asking a federal court to reward his bigoted workplace behavior
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A Christian pastor who worked at a public library in Louisiana just filed a federal lawsuit insisting he was wrongfully fired after being an asshole to one of his colleagues by refusing to address them respectfully.
Or, as Liberty Counsel puts it, he was “unlawfully fired” for “refusing to lie and use false gender pronouns.”
I first wrote about technician Luke Ash, who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, last year, but there’s now been a major update in his story.
The way he explains what happened, he was having a conversation with a co-worker last July about a new employee, whom he referred to using the pronoun “she.” Ash was told that was incorrect and the employee went by “he.”
That was unacceptable to Ash, because apparently he knew damn well this other person was a “biological and chromosomal female.” (How did he know that? No one knows.) “I refused to use those preferred pronouns,” he said.
The next day, he was reprimanded by his boss, maintained that he wouldn’t change his actions, and was subsequently fired for violating the library’s Inclusivity Policy, which says “all employees are welcomed, accepted and respected, regardless of… gender identity or expression,” and that means addressing colleagues using their “chosen name and pronouns.”
There’s an easier way to describe what happened to Ash, though: 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. The library said it was “not working out for the work culture.”
It’s exactly what he deserved.
But that’s not how Christians have been spinning this.
Like bigoted bakers and florists before him, Ash insists he was punished because of his sincerely held religious beliefs… as if being a perpetual dick at work is one of Jesus’ most important demands.
And now Ash has filed a federal lawsuit insisting his religious rights were violated.
Liberty Counsel is seeking a permanent injunction that declares the library’s “Inclusivity Policy” is unconstitutional for violating his constitutional rights of free speech, religious exercise, equal protection, the Louisiana Preservation of Religious Freedom Act, as well as his religious protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The lawsuit also requests that the court order the library to reinstate Pastor Ash to his prior position, restore his benefits, and award backpay, damages, and attorney’s fees and costs.
The argument here is that asking people at a government institution to treat their colleagues with dignity and respect is too heavy a burden for conservative Christians, and that they’re substantially burdening his faith by telling him to use the correct pronoun.
Which is to say: 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 held for an even shorter period of time when the library incident occurred. (The church’s website says he began preaching there in March of 2025.)
As soon as he got fired from the library, 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.
Sadly, that worked. He rapidly become a cause célèbre for conservatives.
Attorney General Liz Murrill chimed in, saying Louisiana “prohibits discrimination based on religion in the workplace.” Which was 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, as far as I can tell, 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 added at the time that “Louisianans should never lose their job because they refuse to lie!” Which should be welcome advice for everyone at that library who wants to tell Luke Ash he’s an ash-hole.
Other right-wing trolls eventually jumped on the same bandwagon, pretending the library violated some kind of religious freedom law that exists only in their broken brains. The American Spectator, for example, argued this wasn’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.”
Hate-preacher Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council 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.”
(Libraries have publicly stated policies for how they acquire books. Self-published dreck written by hate-preachers, for example, may not end up on the shelves. But a bestseller that has reviews published in major outlets will be. That’s not censorship. And books in libraries are not hard to find if you know what you’re looking for, something a library employee would know.)
Given how quickly this story rocketed through conservative Christian circles last year, it seemed almost tailor-made for this situation. I’ll admit even I put on my tinfoil hat when I heard this one because 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 was easy to believe Ash only applied to work there so that 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 was 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).
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.
Maybe that was his goal all along.
When all this happened last year, Christians like hate-evangelist Franklin Graham urged Ash to file a lawsuit, while a top Department of Justice official implied this was all a travesty.
Ash and his lawyers have now followed through. Hopefully a judge can set him straight because the Bible sure as hell isn’t doing it.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
Luke Ash pronouns:
Fired/unemployable/loser
Is asshole a pronoun? I ask because this guy is a biological and chromosomal asshole.