Lawsuit: Password Company Bitwarden Fired Catholic Employee For Listing Pronouns As “Assigned By God”

A former software engineer for password manager Bitwarden says he was fired for putting “Assigned By God” as the “preferred pronoun” on his internal company profile and has filed a lawsuit against the company. Bitwarden operates a password manager with an open-source framework, facilitating the creation and safekeeping of passwords. Chad Scharf, who served as the vice president of software engineering at Bitwarden’s Jacksonville, Florida location, and was responsible for supervising fifty-one people, alleges that his termination was a violation of his Title VII rights against religious discrimination. “Mr. Scharf is Catholic; at the very core of his religion is the doctrine that God created man in his own image, and created them male and female. This has been a Catholic doctrine for over two thousand years,” the lawsuit states. “Mr. Scharf’s religious beliefs are that there are only two sexes and that gender cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated. When pressured by the company to add pronouns to his Slack profile, he chose those in conformity with his religious belief: ‘Assigned by God.’” The complaint alleges that Scharf was constantly pressured to add his pronouns to his employee profile on internal communications tool Slack as part of an “inclusivity initiative.” The complaint states: “Mr. Scharf explained that he chose these pronouns because of his religious beliefs, which would not allow him to be silent in the face of the contrary ideology being advanced and encouraged by Bitwarden. Mr. Scharf explained that he could not speak untruthfully and against his…Lawsuit: Password Company Bitwarden Fired Catholic Employee For Listing Pronouns As “Assigned By God”