By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
Of all the outrages being committed by the progressive left these days, few would compare with the attempts by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to force Catholic hospitals and health-care workers to perform elective hysterectomies for women seeking to “transition” to men, to perform “trans” surgeries, and to require all to perform abortions.
The party of death and its secular arm, the ACLU, have filed two federal lawsuits to strip away from Catholic hospitals and medical personnel their right to decline to perform certain medical procedures as a matter of faith or conscience.
“The last thing anyone should want right now is fewer hospitals. And yet, that may very well be the outcome of lawsuits like this one. If people are worried about the health-care system being overwhelmed today — just wait until liberals force the religiously affiliated groups entirely out of business. Because that’s what’ll happen if the left insists on forcing religious facilities to embrace their radical views,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.
“Catholic nonprofits have told the country before — in adoption and abortion debates — that choosing between their faith and ministry is no choice at all. They’d rather shut their doors than bend an inch on biblical teachings,” he said, suggesting that liberal radicals are willing to “blow a gaping hole in America’s medical care just to advance their political goals.”
Both of the suits take aim at Catholic teaching that Catholic health-care organizations are not permitted to engage in “immediate material cooperation in actions that are intrinsically immoral, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and direct sterilization.”
The first one was filed by 24 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, aiming at nullifying recent Trump administration rules protecting the conscience and religious rights of medical personnel. That rule replaced a 2016 anti-discrimination rule by the Obama administration which would have forced those workers to commit abortions and perform gender reassignment procedures.
Obama’s anti-discrimination rule was blocked by a federal court in late 2016 to protect religious freedom of the health-care workers. That ruling was subsequently upheld on appeal last year.
The new Trump rules were promulgated just days before the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which expanded the definition of “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” under Title VII’s employment discrimination protections.
In the New York suit, the AGs claim that Bostock should apply to health issues, including the rules that provide the operational platform for interpreting the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The result being that the original rules blocked by the courts in 2016 should be in effect.
Thus, under the left’s interpretation, the act “prohibits all health programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance . . . from discriminating against individuals on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.”
Of course, the majority opinion in Bostock, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, went to pains to point out that it only applied to employment cases. “But how these doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII are questions for future cases,” Gorsuch wrote.
At the time, I wrote in this column (July 2 issue), “How about Catholic hospitals who refuse to perform sexual reassignment surgery? There are already a spate of lawsuits claiming that the refusal is discrimination on the basis of sex.” Well, I guess we’re finding out how the Dems and the left want to expand Bostock — as most of us feared.
The second suit was filed in Maryland and involves a woman transitioning to male who is suing a hospital over its refusal to perform the “medically necessary” hysterectomy for her/him to medically make the crossover from woman to man.
Oddly, the plaintiff, a Jesse Hammons, did ultimately receive the surgery from another hospital. But like some of the other LGBTQ bullies who received their requested services from other businesses and still went back and sued, Ms./Mr. Hammons and the ACLU decided to go back and sue the hospital that had originally refused to perform the hysterectomy, which by now she/he had received from another hospital.
The purpose of that, of course, is to bully people of faith into compliance with their sinful demands.
There is a bit of a twist in this case that will make legal scholars study this case in the future. The hospital is not technically a Catholic hospital. St. Joseph Hospital belongs to the University of Maryland Medical System Corporation. That corporation was established by statute and the members of its board of directors are appointed by the Maryland governor. In short, it is a state-owned entity. So how does it come off following Catholic medical protocols?
Well, this might be the tricky part. It seems that a few years ago, St. Joseph Hospital was sold to the Maryland Medical System. Since it was a Catholic hospital and adhered to Catholic hospital directives, part of the terms and conditions of the sale was that it would always adhere to those directives, which it does to this day.
Of course, that gives leave to our ACLU friends to claim that the state is impermissibly governing the hospital by Catholic rules to the disadvantage of the general population, which should be protected by the nondiscrimination clause in the statute that created the Maryland Medical System. And to further complicate the hospital’s legal status, in 2011 the State Supreme Court declared that the University of Maryland Medical System was an “instrumentality of the state.”
Both suits were filed in July, so we have a long way to go before anything definitive is produced. We’ll follow closely.
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