On Tuesday, several organizations filed a lawsuit with Santa Clara County against the Trump administration, petitioning for a federal judge in California to strike down President Trump’s recent conscience protection mandate, issued via the Department of Health and Human Services, which essentially permits healthcare providers to refuse to provide certain care to transgender people on the basis of their religious beliefs.
It was never enough for the Left to advocate that transgender people needed hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery. It was only a matter of time before progressives claimed doctors must be forced not just to act against their conscience, but to practice medicine in a way that many deem harmful.
Lambda Legal, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Center for Reproductive Rights claim the rule will result in “mass confusion among health care providers and is completely infeasible to implement.” The Lambda Legal press release on the lawsuit states:
The lawsuit argues that if these conscience protections are put in place, healthcare facilities might get to stop offering transgender services. This is just the latest in a string of similar lawsuits — attorneys general from New York and California filed lawsuits like this one already.
Aside from the fact that the problems these lawsuits claim may happen haven’t even happened yet, the larger issue at stake with the progressive ethos regarding treatment of transgender people that is experimental at best and medical malpractice at worst, is that it was never going to be good enough to simply acknowledge their willingness to defy reality and embrace a form of medicine that often leaves transgender people feeling the same or worse. If you don’t believe me, remember how the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court case began: Of the hundreds of Denver-area bakers, a same-sex couple had to hire a Christian baker and force him to bake a cake (which didn’t work).
The same thing is happening here predictably, as if following the progressive formula of maximum societal infiltration: Now doctors must provide care, even if it violates their religious beliefs, and even if they don’t believe it’s medically sound. This is not only malpractice and inhumane but indicative that the transgender lobby doesn’t just equality, they want entitlement. They want to force their beliefs on another group until that group relents, which is far more unconstitutional than refusing to provide care for legitimate reasons.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
