It would appear President Joe Biden intends to pick up right where his old boss left off when it comes to targeting religious groups.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration filed an appeal to keep in place a mandate that religious doctors and hospitals perform gender transition procedures, even if those procedures violate their beliefs. The Obama administration first issued the mandate in 2016 as part of the Affordable Care Act, requiring doctors and hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid funding to provide transgender treatments upon the referral of a mental health professional.
Because the Obama administration refused to grant Catholic hospitals and doctors a religious exemption, a group of religious medical professionals took the former president to court and won in several cases. Two federal district court judges ruled against the mandate when it was first implemented in 2016, and two more have since ruled against it. The latest ruling was delivered earlier this year by a North Dakota judge who granted permanent injunctive relief to the religious medical groups.
Now Biden’s Justice Department wants to overturn the North Dakota case and reinstate Obama’s transgender mandate.
This is exactly the kind of discrimination that conservatives feared from Biden, especially after he used the power of his office to redefine “sex” in federal civil rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” This executive order allows the Biden administration to force the normalization of transgenderism upon the rest of the country. Any organization or person that tries to stay out of it could be legally punished for discrimination.
Just like Obama, Biden wants to make an example out of religious people. This appeal is a message to them: Comply with leftist ideology or head on back to court.
However, unlike Obama, Biden is doing all of this right out in the open. Obama took more of a back-door approach, but Biden is deliberately using the power of the entire federal government to codify transgender ideology in every nook and cranny, from Catholic hospitals to public schools to homeless shelters to women’s sports teams.
