Business · Los Angeles, CA Metro · August 14, 2026
LA Public Works Employee Sues City Over Mandatory Pride Flag Exposure at Work
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 11
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.”
The alert itself pushes a thin fact-set harder than it will bear: the headline says a "City" of Los Angeles employee, but the suit Liberty Counsel filed on March 10, 2026 names Los Angeles County and its Department of Public Works, and the alert concedes it was drafted from a headline with no article text. One wrong noun in a public meeting is enough to lose the room on everything else on the page. The negative here is being pushed before it has been checked.
Counter-Rule 11 · Proportional Truth
Refuse to overclaim, even where it would help. One exaggeration hands the other side the only weapon that works permanently.
Before repeating any of this, fix the two facts that are cheap to fix: it is the County, not the City, and the plaintiff is Eric Batman, a senior civil engineer of 24 years at the Alhambra headquarters. Read the Liberty Counsel release and the docket entry itself rather than the aggregator, and when you speak about it, say what the complaint alleges rather than what happened. Refuse to add the mental-health-referral detail or any denial timeline until you have seen it in the filed complaint.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The suit is a textbook use of an institution's own book of rules against it: the County publishes a religious accommodation process and is bound by Title VII, and the complaint's charge is that it denied the accommodation "without the required interactive process" while other employees received comparable accommodations. The March 7, 2023 Board of Supervisors motion flying the Progress Pride Flag is framed as inclusion; the alleged refusal to accommodate one employee is the gap. Whichever side you sit on, the leverage in this case is the distance between a stated policy and its administration.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Close the same gap where you have authority over it. If your church, school or small business states that it accommodates conscience, put the process in writing this month — who receives a request, who decides, how long it takes — and apply it to a request you find inconvenient. Then ask your own employer's HR office for its written policy number and interactive-process timeline in writing, so that if you ever need it, the record shows the rule existed before your request did.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The mechanism at work is one man against a county: a single named employee, 24 years in, whose grievances to the Department of Employee Relations were reportedly turned down before he went to federal court. Liberty Counsel's own framing — that Batman should not fight alone — concedes that isolation is the pressure point. An employee who is the only one asking is easy to treat as an outlier; a dozen asking is a policy question.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Solidarity here is specific and low-drama: if you work for the same employer and share the objection, file your own written accommodation request through the official channel rather than waiting on the lawsuit, so the record shows more than one requester. Keep dated copies. If you are in his parish or his union local, say publicly and without heat that you support a lawful accommodation process — and do not let the man's unusual surname turn him into a joke, which is what would make him easy to dismiss.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
The free 4-minute assessment identifies your mountain and your institution’s capture phase — so alerts like this one arrive matched to where you actually stand.
Facing this yourself? Ask. Describe what is happening and get what the book, Scripture, and the law of your state say, with the exact words to use. Your first one is free.