A United States court has determined that Alaska Airlines will face trial over firing two Christian flight attendants for “hate speech.”

Lacey Smith and Marli Brown were dismissed after questioning their company’s support of the Democrat LGBTQ+ Equality [Safetyism] Act.

First Liberty, who are representing the pair, said,

“The Court remanded the case for trial, holding that there was enough evidence for a jury to find that the Airline and the Union discriminated against them because of their religious beliefs or practices.”

The case, which began in 2020 when the airline backed Black Lives Matter’s agenda, escalated in 2021.

Smith, who had been suspended after calling out the Marxist core of Black Lives Matter, spoke out again when the airline informed staff that they were committing to the Act.

In 2020, Smith circulated a petition called “Depoliticising Alaska Airlines, which correctly argued, in sum, that BLM had “political ties into Marxist communism through its self-proclaimed Marxist leaders.”

Alaska launched an investigation and suspended Smith for mischaracterising the company’s support for BLM and harassment, citing “work safety” concerns.

According to the June 2026 ruling, 6 months later an internal memo from the Airline at the time told staff they were behind the Act.

They described it as seeking to “amend existing civil rights laws protecting individuals from discrimination based on race, colour, national origin, sex, disability and religion.”

This adds, they said, “clear, consistent protections to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Offering feedback, Smith simply asked, “As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?”

In response, the Airline posted,

“Supporting the Equality Act is not about regulating morality. It’s about supporting laws that allow our LGBTQ+ employees and guests, no matter what state they live in or fly to, to be protected against discrimination.”

“We also expect our employees to live by these same values. Our differences are to be respected.”

According to court documents, union boss Jeffrey Peterson made vicious complaints about Smith, telling executives that employees “were alarmed by Smith’s comment.”

Some reportedly said they didn’t feel “they could fly safely with her.”

Smith was fired not long after.

The notice of termination read:

“This was not the first time [Smith] engaged in conduct that was contrary to [Alaska’s] Company values and had a significant negative impact on other employees.”

They then accused Smith of “promulgating divisiveness, and undermining the Company’s efforts to create an inclusive work environment free of harassment and discrimination.”

Marli Brown, who was fired at the same time, had a similar experience.

Commenting on the company’s support for the Democrat bill, which adds “sexual orientation and gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act, Brown wrote,

“Does Alaska support: endangering the Church, encouraging suppression of religious freedom, obliterating women’s rights and parental rights?

“This act will force every American to agree with controversial government-imposed ideology or be treated as an outlaw.

“The Equality Act,” she said, “would affect everything from girls’ and women’s showers and locker rooms to women’s shelters and women’s prisons, endangering safety and diminishing privacy.”

“Giving people blanket permission to enter private spaces for the opposite sex enables sexual predators to exploit the rules and gain easy access to victims. This is the Equality Act,” Brown concluded.

Again, AFA Union head Jeffrey Peterson took issue with criticism of the Act.

He complained to Alaska executives in a thread of emails. In one of those, Peterson stated, “I wish fewer people would struggle so much with unifying their faith with inclusivity.”

Court papers also show another union official insinuating assassination.

AFA representative Terry Taylor posted in a separate chat,

“Can we PLEASE get someone to shut down comments, or put Marli and Lacey in a burlap bag and drop them in a well” (Taylor later revised that message), and also that Brown “needs to go!”

The company later deleted both Smith and Brown’s questions, “shut down further comments, and began investigating both women.”

Alaska Airlines also removed the three-strike rule for comments, and implemented a zero-tolerance approach to anyone expressing a dissenting opinion.

The actions led retiring CEO Brad Tilden to warn executives against “censoring people for having conservative Christian views.”

The lawsuit will now proceed on religious discrimination grounds.

Notably, First Liberty’s summary of the case included an example of how far the company has gone in its support of the Equality Act.

“Alaska Airlines VP of Inflight,” Liberty said, “testified that an employee’s use of the term “opposite sex” violates the Airlines’ discrimination policy because that implies that there are only two sexes.”

Responding to the good news decision, Liberty remarked,

“We are grateful the court recognised the clear evidence of religious discrimination against Marli and Lacey by both Alaska Airlines and the flight attendants’ union.

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision today reinforces that federal civil rights laws protect people of faith from discrimination by their employer or their union. You cannot be fired because your employer does not like your religious beliefs.”

Marco Rubio just delivered a 20-minute presidential-Esque speech that flat-out rebukes Communism.

Here’s why that matters.

First of all, he’s right.

Marxism is a Promethean monstrosity that condemns us all to the prison in Plato’s cave.

Likewise, Socialism. It enslaves societies to an existence not unlike the myth of Sisyphus.

These reasons are why Communism and its just-as-ugly cousin Nazism are two wings on the same vicious bird.

It’s also why both hate the God-over-government liberating heart at work in Christianity through Jesus Christ and the Cross.

Rubio’s remarks coincide with a press release from the US Secretary of State announcing visa restrictions on far-left terrorists and aligned groups.

By far-left terrorism, Rubio means the Marxian Woke (or Mao-Marxist) ideological motivation that incited the execution of Charlie Kirk, and celebrated the multiple assassination attempts (as well as threats) against President Donald Trump.

As defined in Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, far-left terror is political violence masquerading as “anti-fascism.”

“For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called “anti-fascist” rhetoric.”

Groups such as ANTIFA, the memo said, “portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

Far-left terrorism also “embraces extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Marking the release of the Trump White House’s “Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism,” Rubio said,

“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred of civilisation itself.

“It is a revolt of the worst against the best. A revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.

“It’s perpetrated by those who take revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy.”

Summing up the far left’s war on achievers as a politics of envy, Rubio added, “This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists; communists or anarchists, or Marxists.

“But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of ‘equality, justice and liberation.’”

Inherent to these groups is, Rubio stated, an “overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built. To wreck what is beautiful and what is right.”

“Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.”

The “old dogma was wrong,” he asserted.

“None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

Communism never looked good on paper, and more than it looked bad in real life, Rubio remarked.

That world envisions for us all a small, flat, grey existence “levelled of all exception. Drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.”

This world, Rubio said, is a “world without courage, creativity or ambition.

“A world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards. A world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.”

The world “Communism envisions is a world without God.

“For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilisation is an unbearable humiliation. A reminder of what they cannot do, and a reminder of what they cannot be.”

So, Rubio concluded, “they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines, railroads, power grids and laboratories.”

These are “the physical embodied symbols of power, invention and achievement.”

That is “the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.”

The Trump Secretary of State didn’t end there.

Rubio’s speech to 60 nations represented at the Resurgence of Political Terrorism event hosted by his department also identified, what he said was, a post-9/11 blind spot.

While the post-9/11 coalition correctly focused on stopping Islam’s conquest through creeping global Jihad, it overlooked violence from the “political left.”

“Even today,” Rubio noted, “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.”

Many in the media push this narrative. It’s pumped out through academia and “many of our legacy institutions.”

“You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference,” he warned.

Dropping the mic on this double standard surrounding political violence, Rubio said that for these groups,

“A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism.”

Calling out the get out of jail free card handed to perpetrators of left-wing violence, he said,

“For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism.”

“It is the reason why here in my country so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.”

Rubio then drew an example from the George Floyd riots, saying, “City governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.”

“Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.”

“That era,” he declared, “has to end.”

Fully behind Rubio, the Trump administration has described far-left violence as a “transnational threat.”

The assertion was made in a communique posted yesterday (Read more here).

“Hate speech” laws just stopped Päivi Räsänen from transiting through Heathrow.

Christian Concern’s head of policy, Tim Dieppe, confirmed the news on X.

The UK government banned “Räsänen from even setting foot in Heathrow Airport because she has a conviction for quoting the Bible in Finland!”

Breaking the news, Rod Dreher said that Räsänen was on her way to a July Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADF) summit.

She found out mid-flight and was told that the UK wouldn’t allow her to “go through London’s Heathrow airport on the flight back.”

This was, Dreher exclaimed, “because she’s a convicted hate criminal!”

The UK, he added, “determined that her presence in Britain, even simply making a connecting flight in the airport, is unwelcome.”

Stepping back for a second to process the significance of the precedent, Dreher wrote,

“Someone as innocent and gentle as this Finnish granny has been forbidden by the British government even for setting foot in their international airport (which isn’t technically UK territory).”

Noting that the ban only confirmed his suspicions, Dreher said it justified his decision to delay settling in the country.

“If I were deported from the UK over my writing, I could never return. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

The Finnish MP and grandmother is currently appealing an LGBTQ+ lawfare conviction for quoting Romans 1:24-2 in 2019.

Räsänen’s conviction also relates to a pamphlet published in 2004, a decade before Finland legislated to redefine marriage. (Read more here)

Responding to the decision, Alliance Defending Freedom’s Senior Counsel Sean Nelson wrote on X, “Once they label you a hater, they will never stop seeking to punish you. This madness must be stopped. God bless, Päivi Räsänen.”

Co-chair for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, slammed the ban as “ridiculous,” adding, “The only thing more outlandish than her being convicted for hate speech is the UK not allowing her to transit through Heathrow.”

Päivi Räsänen, Brownback declared, “continues to suffer from this gross miscarriage of justice.”

As Lifesite reported, the travel ban is the consequence of Räsänen being “retroactively convicted for defending the biblical position on marriage because LGBT activists and their judicial allies relentlessly pursued her prosecution.”

This is despite her being acquitted twice!

Officially being labelled a “hate criminal”, Lifesite’s Jonathon Van Meran said, “the goal of the LGBT activists who persecuted her.”

The consequences of which “are now coming to fruition.”

Citing Dreher, Meran added that Räsänen, a sitting member of the Finnish parliament, is the canary in the coal mine.

“The progressive bureaucratic order in European countries would rather attack faithful Christians as enemies of society,” Dreher observed, “than deal with the actual problems they have.”

“We can expect more of this. It’s a Finnish Lutheran lawmaker and grandmother today; it could easily be you tomorrow.”

The message is clear: If you post a Bible verse in Finland, then get painted by an activist class cashed up and gunning for you, travel restrictions will be applied to any said “hate speech” conviction.

Päivi Räsänen isn’t a criminal.

LGBTQ+ lawfare is.