Never has religious liberty been more seriously threatened than it is today. That the man responsible for this all-out assault professes to be a Catholic is all the more offensive. It is his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that are leading the charge.
News of Biden’s latest war on religious liberty was selectively leaked to the media. A draft memo by OCR to HHS indicated the Biden administration was planning to revoke the Trump administration’s policies governing religious liberty, including conscience rights. On December 7, 2021 the Trump era protections were overturned.
HHS, under the leadership of Secretary Xavier Becerra, who has a long record of trampling on religious liberty, has worked in tandem with OCR to gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). In his capacity as California Attorney General, he sued the Little Sisters of the Poor for resisting the HHS mandate of the Obama administration; it tried to force the nuns to provide for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plans.
OCR has contended that the Trump administration “took an expansive view of the use of RFRA that resulted in negative impacts for underserved communities.” Translated this means that attempts of radical homosexual and transgender activists to impose their secular agenda on religious institutions and agencies were blocked from doing so by the previous administration. The Biden team wants to undo all of that.
We were delighted that Sen. James Lankford called out the Biden administration on this issue. Unfortunately, another news story broke, detailing how matters have only worsened.
Becerra is actively seeking to eviscerate a wide range of religious liberty exemptions that lawmakers and the courts have granted. He is doing an end run around legislators, appealing directly to the courts to satisfy his agenda. In court filings obtained by the Catholic Benefits Association, there is a symbiotic relationship between HHS and radical left-wing activist organizations, the most prominent of which is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
The evidence shows that transgender rights and abortion rights are being pursued full throttle. Their success depends on the destruction of religious liberty exemptions put in place by the courts, lawmakers and administrative agencies. More than any other entity, it is Catholic institutions that are under the most severe attack.
If Biden gets his way, Catholic doctors and hospitals will lose their autonomy. They will either have to shut down or bend to the anti-Catholic norms of his administration. It’s just that serious.
Currently, no Catholic doctor can be forced to perform gender-transition surgery, and Catholic hospitals can refuse a request by a transgender woman—meaning a man who claims to be a woman—from doing a hysterectomy. Biden wants to change that. He also wants to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. Not to be outdone, Biden wants to deny Catholic hospitals the right not to hire abortionists, doctors who perform abortions.
Biden has also invented a new right: the right of “socially infertile” single persons and homosexual couples to receive fertility treatments. His administration actually believes that these people cannot “reproduce via sexual intercourse due to social factors (our italic).” And what might these social factors be? A “lack of a partner or because of a person’s sexual orientation.”
In other words, it is not biology that stops single people and homosexual couples from having babies—it is society. This is the kind of insanity that happens when nature, and nature’s God, are dismissed and disdained. Regrettably, not only is this nonsense accepted by left-wing organizations, it is embraced by the ruling class, including elites in the healthcare industry. None of them have the guts to call this out for what it is—madness. They are complicit in this contrived universe.
Similarly, denying a woman an abortion, or what Biden prefers to call “termination of pregnancy,” is a matter of sex discrimination. He, and those who work for him, claim that men can also become pregnant. Yet none of them can provide a scintilla of evidence—taken from any country in the history of the world—to verify this baseless claim.
There are several pieces of legislation written by Democrats, such as the Equality Act, that are designed to crush Catholic institutions, but they have been stalled in committee due to their lack of public support. That is why OCR and HHS have elected to bypass Congress and seek court approval for their extremist policies.
The Leadership Conference, which is feeding the Biden team, is comprised of many familiar left-wing organizations. The ACLU, American Atheists, the Anti-Defamation League, the Human Rights Campaign, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for American Progress are all on board. Their hostility to religious liberty in general, and Catholic rights in particular, are well known. What is not widely known is that AARP is a member of this organization. Catholics take note.
We contacted every senator, in both parties, about our concerns and asked our subscribers to contact their senators and voice their objections to this radical agenda.
