By Abdul Masih —
He refused to call a boy “them” in his class, and now, three years later, Irish teacher Enoch Burke is in jail — and, according to family, expects to spend the rest of his life in jail for standing on his Christian convictions.
“This is really a life sentence for my son by this judge,” said his father outside court. “A life sentence for Enoch Burke.”
Called by historians once “the lighthouse of early medieval Europe,” Ireland was the home of St. Patrick and a repository of ancient canonical manuscripts. It was a major missionary-sending nation, like England. How far the island nation has gone from Christ. Read related: Conor McGregor tries to rescue Ireland from woke.
Enoch Burke’s troubles started on May 9, 2022 when the principal of Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath, Ireland, emailed school staff that a certain 3rd-year student had a new name and would be referred to by the pronoun “they.”
Because he has Christian convictions, the German and history teacher didn’t want to, in his words, “bow to transgenderism” and objected in meetings with the principal that the order violated his constitutionally protected freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.
Things escalated quickly. Wilson’s Hospital School suspended him and got a court injunction prohibiting from coming on its grounds. Later, he was fired. Since he believed he couldn’t legally be terminated for his religious beliefs, he kept coming to school, trying to resume teaching, pressing for a resolution that admitted the Irish Constitution.
That’s when the police started arresting him and courts put in him jail for “contempt of court.” (Contempt because, believing his religious rights can’t be denied by a court order banning him from school, he shows up at school.)
To date, he has been jailed four times and has spent 400 days in Mountjoy Prison. At his hearing Dec. 3, the Judge Brian Cregan decided Burke would pay €225,000 in fines and remain in jail until he “expunges” the contempt — by recognizing the court’s authority and by obeying it.
Cregan characterized Burke as a “baleful and malign presence, an intruder, stalking the school, its teachers and its pupils.”
But Burke believes that letting the authorities trample his religious rights would be tantamount to weakening the Constitution. He will spend Christmas in prison away from his family.
Progressive, including the judge, insists that the issue is not religious freedom but disobeying a court order. But when it was the death of George Floyd, progressive dismissed the resisting arrest issues and insisted the base issue, the starting point of the problems, was a $20 forged bill. A man was killed over $20, they complained.
However, when the tables are turned and a conservative faces harsh justice, liberals say the opposite (the starting point is NOT the base issue). Even fact-checking articles and AI argue that the problem is the court order, not the starting point (refusing to use the preferred pronoun).
Burke is sticking to his guns — all the way to jail.
“I do think it a gross injustice that the plaintiff [Wilson’s Hospital] and the court is seeking to deny me my religious beliefs,” he told the judge. “I go back to jail as a law-abiding subject of the State but a subject of God first.”
Burke is reported to have one last appeal to the Irish Supreme Court.
Related content: Ireland’s longstanding antisemitism, Tommy Robison battles Muslim rape gangs inn England, UK pastor fired for holding opinion contrary to government. Sources: Irish Times, Gript, The Journal, Guardian, others.
