A Catholic software engineer was fired by his former employer for putting “Assigned by God” as his “preferred pronouns,” an act which was precedented by pressure from the company to display “gender identity” in the name of “inclusion.”

Chad Scharf, who used to work as the vice president for software engineering at the password management company Bitwarden, lost his job for refusing to violate his religious beliefs by endorsing gender ideology, according to a lawsuit filed at the end of May.

“Ultimately, I was fired because my faith ‘may offend’ someone or could have made someone ‘feel unwelcome,’” Scharf told LifeSiteNews via email. “These are the statements used by the head of HR to complain to the CEO which reasoned that my faith was somehow harassing people through the statement of ‘assigned by God’ in the pronoun field of my Slack profile.”

“There wasn’t even an actual complaint of harassment or offense, it was purely based on virtue-signaling and speculative presumption.”

According to the complaint filed on May 25, Scharf began working for the company in 2020, one year before company-wide “inclusivity” efforts were initiated. Along with other employees, Scharf was “pressured by the company to add pronouns to his Slack profile, [and] he chose those in conformity with his religious belief: ‘Assigned by God.’”

When asked to remove the “preferred pronouns,” he refused to contradict his Catholic faith and argued “that Bitwarden’s policies and practices discriminated against his religion.” The complaint added that “Mr. Scharf was very good at his job and, until he voiced his religious beliefs, never had any issues at work.”

Beginning in March 2021 – one month after being pressured to include “preferred pronouns” in his Slack profile – the company’s human resources department asked him “to remove his pronouns [‘Assigned by God’] and informed Mr. Scharf that he could keep his faith at work but not show it.”

From LifeSiteNews