A Louisiana pastor said he was fired from his job at a library after he refused to use a colleague’s preferred pronouns. Pastor Luke Ash of Stevendale Baptist Church was informed that a woman preferred to be called “he” but continued to use biological pronouns. He later received a notice that his job was terminated.
Appearing on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” the pastor said, “There were several things that were happening at the library to make me know that this was not a place that was necessarily hospitable for a Christian or even a conservatively-minded person, but I just kind of kept my mouth shut and just tried to do a good job and respect everybody that came my way.”
Describing his conviction, Ash emphasized, “I’m not going to lie. I cannot do it. I will not do it.”
“Jesus said, you have to serve God or mammon,” he emphasized. “And a lot of times there is a fork in the road, and we decide to compromise for the sake of mammon. And I think that we’re very good at being lawyers to ourselves and deceiving ourselves into saying, ‘You know what? What I’m doing is actually the more loving thing … if I just concede on this thing, I’m actually being more loving.’ And I would just say no. The loving thing is to tell the truth. Jesus said that he’s the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the father except through him. And so if we back off of the truth, then we back off the visibility of anything at all — but especially Jesus.”
Ash similarly told WBRZ that he believes 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.”
