More mandates?

Richard A. Sokerka

Catholics are well aware of the pitched battle that is being fought with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) due to the Obamacare mandates it has tried to enforce that violate our religious liberties.

Unfortunately, the HHS is unrelenting in this battle. Take for instance its latest mandate that doctors cannot decline performing sex reassignment surgeries. Current health care law bans discrimination against patients on basis of sex. New HHS regulations interpret such discrimination to include cases where requests for procedures involving gender reassignment are denied.

But a group of states, doctors, and hospitals are not sitting still on this issue are suing in the name of medical ethics.

Luke Goodrich, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, recently stated, “The effect is that there are doctors all across the country that are going to be asked to perform gender transition procedures, even when they believe it is going to be physically and emotionally harmful to the patient and against their best medical judgment. And this rule says if you follow your medical judgment, you can face massive liability.”

The HHS would evaluate whether a denial of services meant discrimination on a “case-by-case basis,” according to Goodrich, if they thought a doctor didn’t “have a good reason” for saying no.

That’s why the religious freedom law group is representing religious health providers like the Franciscan Alliance hospital network and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations. Five states — Texas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Wisconsin — have also joined the lawsuit.

We applaud the Becket Fund in its ongoing legal battle with the HHS. Our religious liberties can never be compromised in any way by the federal government and we thank the Beckett Fund for having our collective backs.