On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under ostensibly Roman Catholic President Joe Biden issued a directive banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This order lays the groundwork for another policy the Biden HHS already supports — forcing Roman Catholic doctors and hospitals to violate their consciences by performing experimental transgender surgeries.
Roman Catholic nonprofits rightly excoriated the Biden administration for adopting an anti-Catholic policy.
“The HHS decision this morning turns back the clock on medical sanity,” Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, said in a statement. “This new HHS mandate is a transparent effort to substitute doctors’ medical judgement in the highly experimental and politicized field of gender medicine.”
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While explaining the new policy, Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological male who identifies as female and who serves as assistant secretary of health at HHS, framed the issue as a matter of health care access for regular maladies like a broken bone. “All people need access to healthcare services to fix a broken bone, protect their heart health, and screen for cancer risk,” Levine said. “No one should be discriminated against when seeking medical services because of who they are.”
Burch exposed this deceptive messaging.
“Contrary to the misleading HHS announcement, no American is being denied care for broken arms, or standard medical procedures based on their gender ‘identity’ or sexual orientation. This move by HHS is a setup to normalize and strong arm doctors into administering puberty blocking drugs on children, performing sex-change surgeries, and more,” he explained.
“Catholic hospitals and doctors are likely to come under increased pressure and scrutiny as a result,” Burch warned.
Indeed, Roman Catholic hospitals will not perform procedures that harm their patients’ healthy bodily functions, such as reproduction, unless such measures are necessary to address a worse malady. Catholic hospitals will not perform elective hysterectomies based on transgender identity, for example.
“The announcement conceded that HHS will continue to abide by critical protections contained in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Yet this is the same administration pushing the Equality Act, which would gut all moral and religious protections for medical professionals. Further, the Biden administration is currently fighting in court against Catholic hospitals to overturn these same protections,” Burch noted.
Indeed, in Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Azar (2021), a federal court in North Dakota protected Catholic hospitals from the Obamacare transgender surgery mandate, but HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has moved to defend the mandate in court.
“The Biden administration has invented a phony crisis in order to launch yet another attack on faith-based private health care,” Burch concluded.
The Catholic Association also condemned the Biden administration’s anti-Catholic move.
“Coercing doctors to carry out highly controversial and unproven ‘treatments’ like administering puberty blocking hormones to children and performing irreversible sex changes – against their best medical judgment and conscience – is the latest effort by the Biden administration to force anyone who dissents from its radical ideology into compliance,” Grazie Pozo Christie, M.D, policy advisor for the Catholic Association, said in a statement.
“Politics has no business in medicine, Americans will be worse off because of this harmful policy,” she concluded.
there is no evidence that transgender surgery improves the mental health outcomes of gender dysphoric people. Men and women who formerly identified as transgender and underwent surgery have grown to reject transgender identity and lament the damage they did to their own bodies.
In March, Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital, which treats minors experiencing gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex), announced it would not provide “puberty-blocking” drugs or cross-sex hormones to children under the age of 16. Britain’s High Court protected children under 16 from experimental transgender treatments on the basis that minors cannot consent to procedures that may make them infertile.
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While neither Burch nor Christie explicitly called the Biden HHS directive “anti-Catholic,” the policy aims to enshrine transgender ideology in medicine, forcing Catholic doctors and hospitals to violate their consciences. It directly conflicts with Catholic teaching and it comes as the Biden administration is actively attempting to force Catholic hospitals to perform transgender surgeries.
It is extremely tragic and ironic that Joe Biden, America’s second Roman Catholic president, would support a policy that forces Catholic doctors and hospitals to violate Catholic teaching and their consciences. Yet Biden has repeatedly bucked Catholic doctrine on abortion and transgenderism, and he now seems intent on forcing his views on Catholic professionals, regardless of their convictions.
This only confirms what we at PJ Media have been warning for years: Joe Biden is a radical leftist wolf in Roman Catholic “moderate” clothing.