How many people back in 2008 envisioned that Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America included a change of the meaning of the word “sex”?
Probably a few. But many didn’t, and now his agenda is running into headwinds, with yet another lawsuit against his administration.
The newest lawsuit is being brought by the Becket Fund on behalf of Texas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, Kentucky Gov. Matthew Bevin, the Franciscan Alliance, Specialty Physicians of Illinois and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations.
It challenges a new Department of Health and Human Services regulation that changes the meaning of the word “sex.”
Previous lawsuits have challenged an Obama order to public schools to allow children to use gender-specific facilities according to their gender “identity” rather than their biological sex.
He’s also ordered federal facilities to do the same.
The new lawsuit charges the Department of Health and Human Services is attempting “to impose these dramatic new requirements by redefining a single word used in the Affordable Care Act: ‘sex.'”
“For decades, across multiple federal statutes, Congress has consistently used the term ‘sex’ to refer to an individual’s status as male or female, as determined by a person’s biological sex at birth,” the complaint says.
“But in the regulation, HHS redefines ‘sex’ to include ‘an individual’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.'”
The mandate also requires “virtually all private insurance companies and employers to cover gender transition procedures or face stiff penalties and legal action.”
The regulation, the lawsuit explains, creates a “massive new liability for thousands of healthcare professionals unless they cast aside their medical judgment and perform controversial and even harmful medical transition procedures.”
Congress had refused to redefine the word, and courts also had declined to make such a move.
But the lawsuit explains the Obama administration went ahead with it, basing nondiscrimination requirements on a “sense of gender” that could force health-care professionals “to violate their deeply held religious beliefs.”
The redefinition means a physician would not be allowed to use his or her own best judgment regarding the advisability of a sex-change procedure, the lawsuit says. Including on children.
“No doctor should be forced to perform a procedure that he or she believes will harm a child,” said Becket Fund senior counsel Lori Windham
“Decisions on a child’s medical treatment should be between families and their doctors, not dictated by politicians and government bureaucrats.”
The issue is addressed on a new website, HHS Transgender Mandate.
It explains the HHS rule mandates “that doctors must perform gender transition procedures on any child referred by a mental health professional, even if the doctor believes the treatment or hormone therapy could harm the child.”
The mandate also requires “virtually all private insurance companies and employers to cover gender transition procedures or face stiff penalties and legal action.”
“To be clear, this is not a question of access to care but of forcing a political ideology on doctors against their medical judgment. This mandate would be unique in requiring doctors to violate their Hippocratic Oath,” the site explains.
The complaint gets specific: “The regulation … undermines the longstanding sovereign power of the states to regulate healthcare, ensure appropriate standards of medical judgment, and protect its citizens’ constitutional and civil rights. Under this rule, states are now required to force all healthcare professionals at state-run facilities to participate in medical transition procedures (including hormone therapy, plastic surgery, hysterectomies, and gender reassignment surgery), and to cover those procedures in the states’ health insurance plans, even if a doctor believes such procedures are harmful to the patient.
“We read popular reports about plans for medical and surgical interventions for many prepubescent children, some as young as six, and other therapeutic approaches undertaken for children as young as two. We suggest that no one can determine the gender identity of a two-year-old."
“This case boils down to a very simple question of statutory interpretation: Can HHS redefine the term ‘sex’ to thwart decades of settled precedent and impose massive new obligations on healthcare professionals and sovereign states?
“The answer is ‘no.'”
The complaint points out that almost all of the children who exhibit behaviors such as a boy playing with dolls grow out of them.
“The new regulation applies to 900,000 doctors — virtually every doctor in the U.S., many of whom have chosen the medical profession because they are inspired by their faith to serve those in need and to heal others,” the legal team says. “They have taken an oath to put the needs of each patient first and do no harm. But this regulation violates doctors’ ability to exercise both their best medical judgment and their religiously inspired desire to care for society’s most vulnerable.
“It will also cost health-care providers and taxpayers nearly $1 billion,” the group says.
Even though Congress included in the law an exemption for religious organizations, the rule states that anyone who objects “could assert claims under existing statutory protection,” and it does not “provide any mechanism by which a religious entity could determine if it was entitled to any existing religious protections.”
The case asserts the Obama administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the 10th Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The lawsuit asks for a ruling that the regulation is invalid and unconstitutional and seeks a permanent injunction preventing its use.
WND reported that a major new study from Johns Hopkins psychologists Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh warned against children being subjected to transgender treatment, such as hormone therapy or surgery.
Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University. McHugh is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist in chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Children who express any identification with the opposite gender almost always leave those expressions behind as they grow, they argue.
“Despite the scientific uncertainty, drastic interventions are prescribed and delivered to patients identifying, or identified, as transgender. This is especially troubling when the patients receiving these interventions are children,” the authors wrote in the study, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” published in The New Atlantis.
“We read popular reports about plans for medical and surgical interventions for many prepubescent children, some as young as six, and other therapeutic approaches undertaken for children as young as two.
“We suggest that no one can determine the gender identity of a two-year-old. We have reservations about how well scientists understand what it even means for a child to have developed sense of his or her gender, but notwithstanding that issue, we are deeply alarmed that these therapies, treatments, and surgeries seem disproportionate to the severity of the distress being experienced by these young people, and are at any rate premature since the majority of children who identify as the gender opposite their biological sex will not continue to do so as adults.
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“Moreover, there is a lack of reliable studies on the long-term effects of these interventions. We strongly urge caution in this regard.”
See a discussion of the study: Read More
The New Atlantis
A Journal of Technology and Society: Gender study
Above article by Bob Unruh, August 23, 2016, WND
(Underlines added by Webmaster.)
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