By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The American Civil Liberties Union is suing NJ Transit for firing an 11-year employee after he burned a Koran in a Ground Zero mosque protest in September, according to NJ.com.
On the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, then-NJ Transit employee Derek Fenton, 39, of Bloomington, N.J., was photographed burning three pages of a Koran in front of the space where the proposed Ground Zero mosque will be built. Soon after, he was fired from NJ Transit for violating their ethics codes.
The ACLU is saying that Fenton deserves his job back, as NJ Transit has infringed on his right to free speech, the website reports.
"If you allow governments to censor one kind of speech, you open the door to censorship of all kinds of speech," Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the ACLU in New Jersey, told the site. "Our individual right to free speech depends on everybody having it."
When the train line fired Fenton, it released a statement saying that, "NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee."
A spokeswoman for NJ Transit declined the website’s request for comment.
