This week, a federal court made it clear that the Biden White House is unable to force health care providers and businesses that practice religion to violate their deeply held beliefs by funding or carrying out sex-change medical procedures.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County in June 2020, extending the Civil Rights Act’s Title VII prohibition against sex discrimination to include employment discrimination against individuals based on their transvestism or sexual preferences.
Following the election of President Joe Biden, the U.S. Dept.of Health and Human Services and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interpreted Title VII and the so-called Affordable Care Act to mandate that employer health insurance plans pay for elective sex-change treatments.
In October 2021, the Christian Employers Alliance, a religious business organization, filed a lawsuit against the EEOC, HHS, and other Biden administration officials, arguing that the two federal regulatory obligations went beyond the “government’s legislative and constitutional jurisdiction.”
“Many religious employers hold truly held religious convictions that such gender transition operations and procedures are morally wrong,” the initial complaint stated. “Among them are CEA and all of its members.” “Offering these gender therapies goes against their views that a person’s biological sex is unchangeable and that God made people specifically as either male or female.”
In its lawsuit, the CEA pointed out that neither the EEOC nor HHS had offered religious exemptions from the demands and that its members would be subject to steep fines, drawn-out legal proceedings, potential criminal penalties, and other expenses if they did not comply.
The CEA’s legal representatives, Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota to stop the Biden administration from enforcing the regulations on the organization.
The EEOC’s interpretation of Title VII and HHS’s interpretation of Section 1557 of the ACA would force Christian businesses to provide “insurance coverage for transition procedures that violate their religious beliefs without satisfying scrutiny under the [Religious Freedom Restoration Act],” U.S. District Court Judge Daniel M. Traynor acknowledged in his ruling on Monday.
“It impinges upon CEA’s beliefs to perform or provide health care coverage for gender transition treatments under the EEOC and HHS coverage mandates,” Traynor wrote. “CEA faces severe repercussions if they don’t violate their truly held religious views in order to comply with EEOC and HHS rules.”
Furthermore, he concluded that the Biden administration had not proven that it was unable to defend transvestites’ rights without violating the religious freedom of their Christian employers.
As a result, Traynor issued permanent injunctions against both agencies, prohibiting them from enforcing their separate interpretations of the CEA in a way that would oblige the complainants to carry out or reimburse for sex-change treatments.
