I’m inspired — well, outraged, really — over a local story that popped here in Baton Rouge and is now going national:
BATON ROUGE — A man claimed he was unfairly fired from his job after he refused to use the pronouns that another employee said they used.
Luke Ash, a former library employee and pastor, said he knows that what he did was against the library’s code of conduct for employees, but he says calling his co-workers by the pronouns they identify with would be against his own beliefs.
Ash worked at the library for fewer than six months. He was fired Thursday after having a conversation with a co-worker about another co-worker. In the conversation he refused to refer to the second co-worker by their proper pronouns.
The next day his manager gave him a copy of the inclusivity policy and told him they would figure out how to move forward.
“I refused to use preferred pronouns through the course of conversation,” Ash said. “They got back with me on Thursday morning by giving me the dismissal.”
The policy says the library provides an atmosphere in which all employees are welcomed, accepted and respected. It also says all employees have the right to be addressed by their proper 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.
Tony Perkins had Luke Ash on his Washington Watch podcast to talk about the incident. And it appears this has gotten the attention of someone quite consequential:
What?!! https://t.co/85GMxQWuxV
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) July 16, 2025
It’s not a good idea to do something that gets the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division to perk up on X.
Especially since DOJ has already clearly signaled that it does not recognize trans insanity as the basis for discrimination against functioning adults like Luke Ash.
But this message hasn’t reached everyone. From the local TV report excerpted above:
Logan Wolf, a board member at Forum for Equality, said it’s important to respect someone’s pronouns and use them.
“You just have to treat someone with basic decency, and I think that’s at the crux here,” Wolf said. “This person willingly violated policies and procedures of the EBR library towards another employee, and I think that’s not okay. He’s doing this because he wants to be aggrieved, instead of actually being aggrieved, and it’s just not right.”
It’s important? Important to whom?
There is no basic decency involved in supporting delusions. You are not helping someone by agreeing to be complicit in lies they tell themselves.
Basic decency is the opposite, in fact. Basic decency would be for the trans individual to respect Luke Ash’s recognition that she is a woman and not a man.
I know what your question is. You’re wondering how on earth this could happen in Louisiana, one of the reddest of states. And that’s a fair question.
But it’s the wrong question, because this isn’t a Louisiana issue. It’s a library issue.
American libraries are the perfect distillation of Antonio Gramsci’s famous charge to “march through the institutions.” The Left has made a near-total capture of libraries across the country, and it’s no surprise they’re now freezing out principled men and women of faith with the Pronoun Wars, gay porn on the shelves of the kids’ sections, Drag Queen Story Hours, and other horrific provocations.
If you’ve paid any attention at all to this, you know who Emily Drabinsky is. She was the president of the American Library Association, which is essentially the trade union for the librarians. Drabinsky is, as Adam Carolla is fond of saying, an “angry lesbian” who also identifies as a Marxist and whose advocacy on behalf of every radical leftist cause imaginable made Randi Weingarten look like Joe Manchin.
Drabinsky’s time as ALA president was so provocative that several state legislatures, led by their state freedom caucus chapters, brought the fight to sever their library systems from that organization.
Drabinsky was ultimately dispatched about a year ago, but the current ALA president, Cindy Hohl, differs from her only in rhetorical degree. From Hohl’s Wikipedia entry:
In April 2023, Hohl was elected as president of the American Library Association (ALA) for 2024–2025.[2] After her election was announced, she discussed her intention to lobby against library defunding and book bans, which have significantly increased in the United States since 2021.[2] Hohl is the second Native American to be elected president of ALA, after Loriene Roy.[2]
From 2020 to 2021, Hohl was the president of the American Indian Library Association[1] In that role she was a committee member on the Joint Council of Librarians of Color.[3]
She is the co-chair of the Spectrum Scholarship Advisory Council, which recruits Black, Indigenous, and people of color to the library field.[2] Hohl has co-chaired ALA’s Working Group to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism and has been a member of ALA’s Rural, Native, and Tribal Libraries of All Kinds Committee.[4][2]
Hohl is a board trustee and the treasurer of the Freedom to Read Foundation as well as serving as a standing member on the Indigenous Matters Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.[5]
That’s all you need to know.
But it gets better. Here’s your new ALA president:
Sam Helmick (they/them) is the 2025-2026 ALA President. Helmick served as a member on the ALA Executive Board and a past president of the Iowa Library Association. They previously served as former chair-elect on the Intellectual Freedom Round Table and chair of the Iowa Governor’s Commission of Libraries. They have served on committees for the Network of the National Library of Medicine, the Stonewall Book Awards, the ALA Policy Monitoring Committee, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Michael L. Printz Committee, the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) Sophie Brody Award Committee and the YALSA Fundraising Task Force. Helmick is a 2016 Emerging Leader, as well as an author, consultant, and instructor for social media marketing and graphic design.
How do Emily Drabinsky, Cindy Hohl, and Them Helmick get to run the librarians’ union? Simple. This is who the librarians are. Studies show they’re 70 percent female, 77 percent white, and just under 30 percent queer in some manner.
And better than three-quarters of them are Democrats.
Luke Ash is utterly out of place working in a library, even in a town like Baton Rouge where most of the Democrats still recoil from the idea of having to indulge the they/thems of the world.
And to violate his civil rights by forcing him to support a lie carries zero apprehensions to the members of the ALA.
You aren’t going to fix this, you know. It can’t be fixed. This is an institution that is lost.
The only question remains is whether you’ll continue to consent to funding it.
At a time when your local library board could literally give away a Kindle and a Kindle Unlimited subscription to everyone in your town who wants one and save a significant amount of money while providing greater access to books than the libraries do.
They will screech like banshees over any notion of budget cuts, when everyone knows this is a jobs program for dysfunctional, radical leftists living in a woke dream world. Because what good is marching through the institutions once they’ve been destroyed?
And the libraries have been destroyed. When a librarian is fired for speaking the truth, it means the library itself has rejected the truth and has now become a storehouse of lies.
And it’s an affront to your civil rights to force you to pay for it.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
Gavin Newsom Is Now the Simon Legree of Modern American Politics
