BATON ROUGE (LifeSiteNews) — A Louisiana pastor has been fired from his second job as a library technician for refusing to refer to a female colleague by male pronouns, in a case that has garnered attention from state and federal officials.
The Baptist Message reports that Luke Ash, the bivocational pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church, took a job with the East Baton Rouge Parish Library three months ago. On July 7, he says, a coworker responsible for training a gender-confused new employee (whom Ash never directly interacted with) attempted to get him to refer to her as “he.” The next day he was reprimanded “for not upholding the library’s inclusivity policy by refusing to use preferred pronouns” and fired on July 10.
Ash says he originally had some concerns about the library’s policies, but thought he would be able to focus on his own duties. But ultimately it was “not a hospitable place for a Christian or someone who is politically conservative to work.”
Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murril, as well as U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, all weighed in on the case, blasting the library’s actions as discriminatory and possibly in violation of state law:
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! https://t.co/1r5r4FdhEk
— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) July 16, 2025
Louisiana isn’t New York or California.
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. https://t.co/IKoqZnUV9J— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) July 17, 2025
What?!! https://t.co/85GMxQWuxV
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) July 16, 2025
It is a dictate of progressivism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against biological males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
