Wilson Hospital School in Ireland decided to suspend one of its teachers because he refused to use the pronoun “they” when speaking to a certain student. Enoch Burke was arrested and urged to undergo a disciplinary process.
Namely, the student identifies as transgender, and Burke believes that that is against Christian beliefs. The court imposed a temporary barring order, but Burke returned to the school nevertheless, and he was caught and taken to prison.
“I am a teacher and I don’t want to go to prison,” Burke said regarding the incident. “I want to be in my classroom today, that’s where I was this morning when I was arrested … I love my school, with its motto Res Non Verba, ‘Actions not words,’ but I am here today because I said I would not call a boy a girl.”
The court order was issued after he continued going to school despite being initially suspended in August. In defiance of the court order prohibiting him from teaching, he asserted that doing so would be against his conscience, said the Daily Caller.
Burke testified in court that he couldn’t violate his conscience by taking part in the child’s gender transformation even though he loved his students and the subjects he taught and didn’t want to go to jail.
“To be clear, this teacher was jailed for breaching a court order, not for ‘misgendering.’ But that court order barring him from the school because he refused to use ‘they’ for a male student, should never have been granted IMO,” Helen Joyce, a commentator on transgender issues and an author, wrote. “Sinister and absurd.”
Wilson’s Hospital School remains silent and doesn’t comment on the subject.