"The federal government was trying to force all doctors and health care providers to perform gender transition procedures,” says Becket attorney Joe Davis, “even if they believe that those procedures are harmful, and even if their religious beliefs forbid them from performing those procedures.”
Even operating on a mentally confused person is itself a moral and ethical dilemma for physicians, since their profession is split over the issue, but physicians witnessed the Biden administration announce in May it was overturning President Trump and reverting to an Obama-era policy from 2016 that pleased LGBT activists.
Critics of the policy call it the “Transgender Mandate,” and Becket jumped into the issue in the legal case Franciscan Alliance v Becerra.
Five years after the Obama administration announced its Mandate, a federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration by granting a permanent injunction against the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.
The federal judge, Reed O’Connor, said the DHS Mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
"We got a great decision in the litigation protecting religious health care providers from having to perform gender transition procedures that violate their religious beliefs,” Davis tells American Family News. “And that order is a really important one for religious liberty, and a really important one for good medicine and common sense, in the health care profession."
The Biden administration has 60 days to appeal the ruling.
