A pastor in Louisiana has lost his side job at a public library — which he used to support his family — after he refused to use his coworker’s preferred pronouns. The pastor explained to conservative commentator Tony Perkins that he had been reprimanded for refusing to “get on board” with the use of preferred pronouns, and was fired a day later.
For background, Luke Ash, a bivocational pastor at Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, also worked as an interdepartmental loan technician at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library until he was fired for taking what Tony Perkins called “a biblical stand” by using “biologically accurate” pronouns for a coworker.
Speaking on a July 15, 2025, episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Ash explained that he had switched from a side job as a truck driver to working at the library so that he “could give more of my time to the church and my family.” Moreover, Ash explained that after four months at his library job, he was chastised by a supervisor when he refused to “get on board” with using his coworker’s preferred pronouns.
Furthermore, Ash said that when he was confronted with an ultimatum regarding the use of preferred pronouns, he said, “I’m not going to lie, I cannot do it.” Moreover, Ash told Perkins that he knew that the library would not be “necessarily hospitable for a Christian or even a conservatively minded person.” He added, “But I just kind of kept my mouth shut and just tried to do a good job and respect everybody that came my way.”
Continuing, Ash said that he had taken the job because “part of the job of a pastor is to disseminate information, and so I was going to still play a part of that in my tentmaking job.” However, the pastor said that even though he knew that refusal to use preferred pronouns would lead to problems, his “religious convictions” mattered more. He explained, “When those things are in contradiction with each other, there has to be given preference for one or the other.”
Additionally, Ash said that he had heard his colleagues at the library making fun of books written by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying, “They’re absolutely limiting access to books,” adding, “It’s not just about…banning a book on a piece of paper. If you can pretend that that book doesn’t exist, that’s even more effective.”
Ash went on to say that because he no longer has his library job, he is struggling financially, but that he was unwilling “to compromise for the sake of mammon.” He added that the library “made their decision that they would rather have a difficult conversation with me than for a transgender person to hear something that they didn’t want to hear.”
Featured image credit: video screengrab — Tony Perkins