By Catholic League president Bill Donohue
On May 10, the Biden administration announced that it would
force doctors who can perform sex transition surgery to do so, regardless of
their religious objections. This is a declaration of war on Catholic doctors
and hospitals. It will also be contested in the federal courts.
Predictably, the media are billing this Health and Human
Services decision, which applies Title IX of civil rights law to the rights of
transgender persons, as an anti-discrimination measure, not as an attack on
religious liberty. Title IX bars discrimination based on sex, but says nothing
about transgender persons.
The Obama administration was the first to argue that Title
IX should apply to transgender persons; the Trump administration disagreed; the
Biden administration agrees with the Obama administration. In a May 10 news
story by the Associated Press (AP) on this subject, it said that the Obama
administration "relied on a broad understanding of sex shaped by a person's
inner sense of being male, female, neither or a combination."
Paradoxically, this AP interpretation is both accurate and
inaccurate at the same time.
It accurately conveys what both the Obama and Biden
administrations believe: being male or female is a subjective judgment, one
that allows a man or a woman to deny that they are a man or a woman, or any sex
at all, for that matter. Which means they could be an acorn. It is inaccurate
because it is a fiction: one's "inner sense" of what sex one belongs
to may be inaccurate. What matters is reality, not tales from "The
Twilight Zone."
This assault on common sense and religious liberty began in
2015 when the Obama administration issued a mandate requiring doctors and
hospitals to provide for transgender surgeries. They made no exemption for
those who had religious objections.
The Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and
Human Services announced new regulations that interpreted Section 1557 of the
Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) as meaning that "sex" would be
redefined to include such things as "gender identity," thus inventing
rights for transgender persons.
According to Ryan T. Anderson and Roger Severino,
"Under these guidelines, if a covered physician administers treatments or
perform surgeries that can further gender transitions, that
physician must provide them for gender transitions on the same
terms, and insurance must cover it, regardless of the independent judgment of
the physician" (italics in the original). It also denied religious
exemptions.
Interestingly, doctors who worked for the Obama
administration at the time said, "Based on a thorough review of the
clinical evidence...there is not enough evidence to determine whether gender
reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for [patients] with gender
dysphoria."
On President Trump's last full day in office, January 19, a
federal court struck down the transgender mandate forcing doctors to perform
transgender surgeries. Last month, the Biden administration filed an appeal; it
wants to deny religious exemptions. Now it is jumping the gun: Health and Human
Services chief Xavier Becerra's policy statement is seeking to do just that.
Pope Francis has observed that "biological sex and the
socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not
separated." The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops affirms what
the Holy Father has said. It also opposes requiring religious organizations
"to cover 'transition' procedures in their employee health insurance
plans...."
It must be noted that Catholic hospitals do not deny
routine health care to transgender persons. There is a difference between
denying transgender persons treatment for Covid and forcing a Catholic doctor
to make anatomical changes on the sexually confused.
The Biden administration's war on Catholic hospitals is one of many policies it has promoted that endanger religious liberty. That they are being shoved down on our throats by a man who professes to be a "devout Catholic" is all the more nauseating.
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