: (This is from FoxNews.com.)

Pennsylvania Man Says He Was Fired Because of Confederate
'National Origin'

NEW STANTON, Pa. - A man born and raised in Pennsylvania says he was discriminated against because of his national origin, which he describes as "Confederate Southern American."

In a lawsuit filed Friday, 62-year-old Curt Storey, of Hunker, Pa., said Burns International Security Services fired him from his job as a security guard in May for refusing to remove Confederate flag and related stickers from his lunch bucket and pickup truck.

Storey wants to be reinstated to his $8-an-hour job along with back pay and damages.

Kirk Lyons, Storey's attorney, works for the Southern Legal Resources Center, which has represented white separatist groups and other people who say they have been discriminated against because of their Confederate heritage.

Lyons said the case is the first of its kind filed by someone who has lived his entire life north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Storey has Southern ancestors, and Lyons said the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission standard for national identity should include anyone who feels strongly about their ties to the old South or the Confederacy.

A representative who answered the telephone at the Burns International office in Pittsburgh said Saturday that nobody was available to comment on the lawsuit.

Storey considers his firing discrimination "because Burns Security specifically targeted Confederate symbols only ... Burns assumes, prejudicially, that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol and that therefore I am intentionally trying to offend other workers."

Two small Confederate flags decorate Storey's lunch box and he has two other stickers on his truck, reading "Heritage not hate" and "The South was right."

Storey said "The South was right," refers to a book that argues the Civil War was fought over states' rights to sovereignty, not slavery.

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