(ZENIT News / Australia, 10.07.2024).- Enoch Burke was released after spending 400 days in prison, for refusing to use transgender pronouns when the Director of his school ordered him to use a feminine name and pronoun for a male student in the process of gender transition.
On June 28 of this year, Judge Mark Sanfey of Dublin’s High Court ordered Enoch Burke to be released from the Mountjoy Prison, where he had been an inmate since September 2022. He is out on conditional freedom, banned from returning to the school where he was teaching.
Burke is a Christian teacher of History and German in Ireland. He was placed on paid administrative leave in August 2022, while the School Board proceeded on the disciplinary offense. He continued attending the school, although he was banned from entering it, an order he ignored. Then, on September 5, 2022, he was arrested and sentenced to prison for an indefinite period, until he paid the debt for his action or the Court decided otherwise.
After 108 days in prison, he was given a temporary release, the Judge arguing that Burke used his imprisonment for his ends.
In January 2023, the school fired Burke, but he continued to appear at the school, accumulating daily a 700-euro fine.
He was imprisoned again in September 2023. Burke has repeatedly said that his imprisonment and dismissal are unjust, stating before the Judge in 2023 that “you want to fine me for my religious beliefs.”
He has also denied that he has been in contempt of court. His arrest and imprisonment respond to his refusal to comply with the judicial order banning him from appearing in the school.
Wilson’s Hospital School, where Burke worked, is a mixed school of Anglican tradition, founded in 1761 for young people of scarce resources and children of retired military men. It has 400 students, the majority boarders.
In Ireland, as in other countries, woke ideology and queer doctrine have led to legislation and procedures that create unbalanced tensions, because they favour a group that is said to have been retaliated against for retaliating against those that think differently.
Burke was imprisoned for refusing to use the neutral word “they” towards a student in the process of gender transition. The Royal Spanish Academy included “they” in its Observatory of Words, but as it created controversies it was removed from the vocabulary.
When Burke entered prison on September 5, he said: “The gender ideology is against my Christian belief, against the Scriptures, the ethics of the Church of Ireland and of my school. I’m a teacher and I don’t want to go to prison. I want to be in my classroom, where I was this morning when I was arrested.”
Burke described the situation as “madness” and, in the trial, he expressed his “love for the school.” He took the school’s motto, “Res Non Verba” (Actions Not Words), as the cause of his being incarcerated, and said it was a punishment “for not calling a girl a boy”; he criticized “the seriousness” of the criteria to “suspend someone,” although he has an impeccable teaching curriculum.
Burke’s case reflects the aggressivity of the transgender ideology in the society. Some acclaim him as a public defender of freedom amid the growing expansion of the gender ideology.
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