In President Joe Biden’s first few hours in the White House, he took up the pen to begin immediately signing executive orders, undoing much of the hard work of President Donald Trump. In short, these executive orders are designed to unravel border protections, economic protections, protections for the ability of Americans to find gainful employment, tax breaks for small businesses, and perhaps most importantly, to undo freedom from the mandate of Obamacare.
Fortunately, our system is too robust to be completely demolished in a single day. One day before Biden took the oath of office, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Peter D. Welte of North Dakota granted a petition to prevent the Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) from enforcing an Obamacare rule that obligates doctors, healthcare providers, and other medical professionals to perform sex-change operations and other transgender services.
The HHS had issued the rule in 2016 which interprets a section of the Affordable Care Act prohibiting discrimination as a mandate for doctors to perform transgender surgeries, hormone therapies, and other sex change related services. The rule prohibits insurance providers from offering plans that exclude gender transitions. It also prevents healthcare providers from refusing services related to gender transitions if the same services are being given to other patients for other reasons.
Notably, the rule provides no exemption for religious abstentions. The rule states that religious exemptions apply only to educational applications. In other words, it says that a doctor may say that he does not believe transgender surgeries are morally acceptable, but he cannot refrain from performing them.
The department said that it would consider religious objections on a case by case basis – giving doctors the opportunity to have their religious freedoms stripped from them in a more personalized way.
A number of Catholic organizations challenged the mandate and the State of North Dakota joined their efforts in a lawsuit. In 2019, the mandate was put on hold by a North Dakota federal judge, and struck down by another federal judge from Texas.
The statement from Judge Welte read, in part:
“The Catholic healthcare entities’ refusal to perform gender-transition procedures is based on the exercise of their religious beliefs which are protected by the First Amendment. Absent an injunction, plaintiffs will be ‘forced to violate their religious beliefs’ by performing gender-transition procedures or incur monetary penalties by refusing to comply.”
Attorney Luke Goodrich, of Becket, a religious group representing the plaintiffs, said the decision “recognizes medical provider’s right to practice medicine in accordance with their conscience without politically motivated interference.”
Sadly, the assault on the rights of medical practitioners to abstain from providing services that violate their sincerely held beliefs is far from over. The Biden Administration has committed itself to pushing what it calls “LGBTQ rights” on the medical community.
In the near future, we can expect similar laws to affect the public school system, hindering the ability of parents to know what their children are being taught and how they are being treated. In other words, this is only the beginning…
