Another judge has affirmed, correctly, that the federal government may not require doctors to provide sex-change procedures and abortions against the dictates of their consciences and their best medical judgments.
It’s long past time for the Biden administration and its leftist allies to abandon despotic attempts, under the false flag of “social justice,” to trample individual conscience rights. Ethically and morally, surgery that is effectively forced at the point of a government gun borders on what Winston Churchill called “perverted science;” the conscription of doctors and people of faith for acts against their deep beliefs violates Thomas Jefferson’s righteous vow of “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
In 2016, the Obama administration had issued a rule imposing mandates, under threat of severe financial penalties, for doctors to provide gender-transition treatment to patients, including minors, even against a doctor’s belief that the treatment would be harmful. Courts in Texas and North Dakota blocked implementation of the rule in decisions in 2016 and 2019, but the Biden administration announced in May that it would revive the policy in light of a 2020 Supreme Court decision involving transgender employment.
The Biden team’s reliance on the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County case, however, was inapt. Bostock involved employment issues under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, whereas the Biden team was attempting to shoehorn that decision into a section of the Obamacare law that had nothing to do with labor practices.
In response, nine states and an association of more than 20,000 healthcare professionals joined a religious hospital in requesting an injunction blocking the new Biden rule. On August 9, federal district judge Reed O’Connor of Texas granted the permanent, nationwide injunction against any administration attempts to require healthcare providers “to perform or provide insurance coverage for gender-transition procedures or abortions.”
Judge Reed rightfully noted that the Biden rule ignored both a religious exemption seemingly built into Obamacare law itself and, more explicitly, the tenets of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. RFRA was passed unanimously by the House, and by the Senate 97-3, with Biden himself in favor of the law he now wishes to ignore. The Biden rule, Reed decided, “substantially burdens Christian Plaintiff’s religious exercise” with “quintessential irreparable injury” to their RFRA- and First Amendment-guaranteed freedom of religion.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which served as legal counsel for the plaintiffs, explained that the Biden rule could force doctors to violate not just their religious beliefs but also their medical assessments and thus their Hippocratic Oaths.
“Research shows,” says Becket’s case summary, “that not only are there significant risks with gender reassignment therapy — especially in childhood — such as heart conditions, increased cancer risk, and loss of bone density, but most children with gender dysphoria grow out of it naturally without these invasive procedures.”
Furthermore, “the government’s own panel of medical experts concluded that these procedures can be harmful and advised against requiring coverage of these medical and surgical procedures under Medicare and Medicaid.”
The Becket Fund and Judge O’Connor are both right. Both morally and constitutionally, there’s a big difference between making something legal and making it mandatory. As religious liberty, what some founders called “freedom of conscience,” is the “first freedom” that is the very heart of the American experiment, government has no proper authority to compel actions that violate a man’s faith.
Long before he was elected to any public office, founder James Madison wrote to a friend from Princeton to “pray for Liberty and Conscience to revive among us.” Judge O’Connor’s ruling keeps that prayer alive.
