Federal Judge Rules She Lacks Authority to Reinstate Fired Yosemite Ranger who Flew Trans Pride Flag

A federal judge ruled on Friday that she has no authority to reinstate a park ranger who was fired from Yosemite last summer after flying a trans pride flag on their day off.

Shannon “SJ” Joslin, who identifies as nonbinary, sued the Department of the Interior, which includes the National Park Service, earlier this year after being fired for hanging the flag across the park’s El Capitan rock formation in California last year.

The former ranger in their lawsuit asked the Biden-appointed judge to reinstate Joslin and to keep the government from launching a criminal investigation.

Joslin had argued in the lawsuit that the government had “enforced its rules selectively based on the message that the pride flag sends,” and that Joslin’s firing was “vindictive, retaliatory, [and] intended to communicate disapproval of a particular point of view.”

U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston wrote in her ruling obtained by Fox News Digital: “The government claims for its part that Joslin was fired for reasons that had ‘nothing to do’ with “speech,” adding, “But the government has another more fundamental and more persuasive point: under the laws that Congress has passed, and under the legal precedent that a federal trial court must follow, this Court does not have authority to decide whether Joslin was fired for unconstitutional or illegal reasons, nor to block a hypothetical criminal case against them.” (Read more from “Federal Judge Rules She Lacks Authority to Reinstate Fired Yosemite Ranger who Flew Trans Pride Flag” HERE)