by WorldTribune Staff, September 4, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
The latest edition of the Wide World of Woke takes us to Ireland, where a history and German teacher has been jailed for nearly 400 days for refusing to recognize a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
Enoch Burke, who was first suspended from Ireland’s Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath in August 2022, said being forced to recognize the student’s pronouns is a violation of his religious rights.
Burke continued to show up to the school in an attempt to teach lessons resulting in a court injunction that barred him from the school grounds, though he says he stills receives a salary from the school.
Burke has been jailed three times at Mountjoy Prison, a medium security men’s jail in Dublin, for breaching the court order.
“You will answer to God for imprisoning me for my religious beliefs,” Burke told the judge who found him in contempt of the order on Monday, The Irish Times reported.
In a statement to Newsweek, his brother, Josiah Burke, said that Enoch “has spent almost 400 days in prison” for refusing to use the student’s preferred pronouns and name.
“Judge after judge has refused to vindicate and uphold his constitutional right to freedom of religion and expression,” Josiah Burke said. “Enoch Burke’s ongoing imprisonment is the true face of the ‘inclusive’ LGBTQI+ movement: a sincere, upright Christian teacher arrested and imprisoned after simply refusing to endorse and affirm transgenderism, an anti-Christian ideology that entraps vulnerable children and puts them on a fast track to abuse, mutilation, depression and sadly for so many, suicide.”
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Last month, Burke was arrested again by the Garda (Irish police) for returning to the school grounds once term time had resumed on Aug. 22.
He told Sky News: “I teach everyone who’s in front of me. I teach every single student. But when I am commanded, when I’m told that I can’t have my religious belief anymore, when I’m told I have to confess belief in transgenderism, instead of my simple belief, which is male and female, that’s just a breach simply of my rights.”
“”Well, our religious rights are protected in this country. The school and the courts are denying me those rights. That’s the thing. I did my duty here. I have to do what’s right. I am at work,” Burke told the Irish Mirror.
When he was sent back to prison this week, Burke said: “I am a Christian. I have Christian beliefs. My belief is male and female, God made them male and female.”
Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
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