REUTERS
LAS VEGAS — A fired United Airlines flight attendant says the carrier’s “friendly skies” turned decidedly hostile when he spoke with a colleague about his faith’s gender doctrine.
The 28-year-veteran employee said neither the airline nor the Association of Flight Attendants union would take his side in the face of an anonymous X complaint laden with what he said were false accusations.
Ruben D. Sanchez Jr., 52, of Anchorage, Alaska, wants to raise $18,000 via GoFundMe to continue the fight to get his job back.
“I’m too young to retire and too old to start new,” the former jet-setter told The Post in a telephone interview.
He said he’s taken “a pay cut from what I made with United” working as an active-duty member of the Air National Guard in Alaska.
Sanchez said his troubles began on a May 31, 2023, red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland.
He was trying to stay awake, he said of the last-minute assignment, and ended up speaking with another flight attendant about their shared Catholic faith — and the next day’s start of Pride month.
The annual gay-rights observance is “a big deal at United,” Sanchez said. The airline “has all these things about Pride, with the Pride flags everywhere” and “drag-queen DJ s” playing music at United’s Los Angeles terminal.
“It was just innocent. ‘Let’s have a conversation so I can stay awake,’” Sanchez said.
But Sanchez was overheard by an unidentified person who then complained to the airline via X.
“I said, ‘You know, as Catholics, we’re not really supposed to be observing Pride,’” the now-former flight attendant said. “‘The church will never believe that men give birth, women have penises or that the church should bless same-sex marriages because marriage is a sacrament, and it’s not meant for two men or two women or three people or whatever.’ That’s all I said.”
Sanchez said the online complainant claimed, “I hate all black people,” and “I am proudly anti-trans” — which isn’t true, he told The Post.
Suspended with pay over the unsubstantiated tweet-complaint, Sanchez said a supervisor said the airline would examine his Twitter history.
That timeline revealed Sanchez had once posted a couple of Joan Rivers jokes about Elizabeth Taylor’s weight and one about plus-size pol Chris Christie, which a supervisor said showed disrespect to any “passenger of size.”
Sanchez said the airline also saw as problematic his tweets about removing the “transgender triangle” from the Pride flag and dissenting from global warming.
He was told a humorous photo of him carrying a pilot over his shoulder that “went viral” online “created a nexus” between his personal social-media posts and his job.
The Post asked United Airlines for comment, and the firm twice said via email, “We won’t have anything to share” about Sanchez’s case.
Officials at the Association of Flight Attendants union headquarters, United Airlines counsel and local counsel in Houston, which initially represented Sanchez in the investigative process, also did not respond to The Post’s multiple calls and emails seeking comment.
This isn’t the first time the flight attendants’ union has been criticized for not supporting religiously observant employees.
First Liberty Institute, a public-interest law firm, sued in January on behalf of two Alaska Airlines flight attendants who questioned the carrier’s support for the 2021 Equality Act, a proposal that would’ve added LGBTQ protections to federal civil-rights law.
The Alaska Airlines workers’ suit alleged the AFA-CWA Master Executive Council did not support the employees but instead reported their comments to company officials.
First Liberty has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case after a lower court ruled against the workers.
“Employers are increasingly becoming more hostile to people of faith in the workplace, and you’re seeing that play out in a lot of different ways,” David Hacker, the group’s vice president of litigation, told The Post. “We at First Liberty have seen these types of situations popping up more and more, and that’s a disturbing trend. . . . The law provides that employers cannot discriminate against you based on your religious beliefs or practices.”
Hacker said corporate shareholders must push back on woke corporate attitudes and where the federal government says companies “can’t discriminate against people based on their faith.”
“There’s no one silver bullet to change it. But there’s certainly a lot of different tools in the toolbox, and we should be using all those to make sure that people of faith are protected,” he said.
Sanchez said because the union said it wouldn’t represent him in arbitration, he tried — and failed — to raise roughly $15,000 to pay those costs.
He hopes to use the GoFundMe proceeds to cover existing legal bills and move forward with his case.