Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
A federal court issued a nationwide injunction against an Obamacare rule in 2017 that would have required doctors and other health care providers receiving federal funds to perform procedures that violated their religious beliefs and conscience, such as “sex change” operations and abortions.
A coalition of states and Christian providers sued the federal government to stop the law’s enforcement.
The administration sought to expand the definition of sex in Title IX to include “gender identity.” The judge, Reed O’Connor, contended that the “meaning of sex in Title IX unambiguously refers to ‘the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.'” According to the court, the adminstration’s attempt violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
The Hill reported that the same judge this week overturned the Obamacare rule, declaring that it violated providers’ religious freedom.
President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services initially defended the rule, but the Trump administration decided to drop its defense and argued the rule should be sent back to the agency to be rewritten.
The Trump administration is working on a regulatory fix and has issued a proposed rule that would scrap ObamaCare’s definition of “sex discrimination” to remove protections for gender identity.
If the Republican Congress had repealed Obamacare, with a Republican in the White House ready to sign the bill, Christians and others with conscientious objections to performing morally repugnant procedures would not have to keep fighting to protect their rights.
