Chard Scharf was Vice President of Software Engineering at Bitwarden, an online service that stores passwords and other sensitive information. He was then fired for putting “Assigned by God” as his preferred pronoun on his employee profile.
A civil rights lawsuit Scharf just filed alleges that Bitwarded, by allowing other employees to choose their pronouns but firing him from using pronouns that were based on his religious beliefs, violated his Title VII rights against religious discrimination.
Making that allegation, the lawsuit states that Bitwarden put Scharf in a “disfavored class” by punishing him for his religious beliefs and his request for accommodation of them while letting other employees acted based on their ideology, saying, “Bitwarden violated Title VII when it placed Mr. Scharf into a disfavored class by promoting its gender ideology, when it failed to approve his reasonable request for accommodation, and when it terminated his employment.”
Speaking to the Epoch Times about the situation and why this looks like a violation of Scharf’s religious rights, his attorney, Jennifer Vasquez, said, “Had Chad set aside his religious beliefs and acquiesced to Bitwarden’s promotion of gender ideology, he would not have been fired, which means his religious beliefs were the cause of his termination.”
Vasquez added, “We have a real growing hate against Christians now. I feel like, for some reason, companies don’t think they have rights because of the spirit of the time.” She then noted that “COVID kind of woke up this religious right debate in this workplace,” as people realized that companies could and would punish them for refusing to comply with a policy on reasonable religious grounds.
She could be right on that count, as an Illinois hospital chain just lost a multi-million dollar Title VII lawsuit over its refusal to grant vaccine exemptions to those who had religious grounds for refusing to take the vaccine because aborted stem cells were used in its development.
Adding more details about the situation, the lawsuit alleges that when Scharf was told he could not put “Assigned by God” as his preferred pronouns on his Slack profile as part of the company’s “inclusivity initiative,” he, in turn, told the Bitwarden executives that, according to his strong Catholic faith, there are just two sexes and “gender cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated.” The company’s executives refused to accept that argument and continued to pressure him to ad his pronouns to his Slack profile for inclusivity reasons.
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Then, the lawsuit claims, as he refused to add his pronouns and make his religious stance clear, two HR employees says that they felt “harassed” by his statements of religious faith and he was reprimanded for not using a job applicant’s preferred pronouns. Bitwarden then fired him.
Vasquez suggested that Bitwarden’s unyielding stance on the matter and decisive push for wokeness in the workplace could be a result of its wishes to get a better ESG score, which in turn leads to investments from ESG funds.