A county Democratic official in Pennsylvania says he was forced to step down over a Facebook post saying he “[stands] for the flag.”

Mark Salvas, the former executive director of the Allegheny County Democratic Party, told Pittsburgh’s KDKA News that the county party chair asked him to resign after just weeks on the job. 

Salvas, a former Marine and Gulf War veteran, told KDKA that his forced departure was prompted by two social media posts, including one photo of him and his wife with the words: “I stand for the flag, I kneel at the cross.”

“I’m not ashamed of my patriotism, not one bit. I fought for this country. I think I have a right to have a voice and be patriotic,” Salvas told KDKA. “It’s never easy when people you have never met accuse you of things and call you names, and you’ve never met them.”

{mosads}The other controversial post was from Salvas’s wife, asking for support for a family friend, a police officer who was charged with homicide in the shooting death of Antwon Rose II, an unarmed black teen who was a passenger in a car fleeing a traffic stop.

State Rep. Ed Gainey (D) told KDKA that the posts were “insensitive” and offensive to many Democrats in Pennsylvania.

“To put that up on Facebook was, to me, insensitive, also to African-Americans, who, as you know, have backed the Democratic Party for quite a long time, and everybody knows that it was insensitive,” Gainey said.

Salvas said he was asked to resign “due to the controversy that was taking place on social media.”