(Liberty Bell) – A battle is raging in the Tennessee-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit over the extent to which the federal government can make a doctor violate deeply held beliefs for the sake of appeasing the LGBT community, a fight that could potentially set a precedent for medical professionals all over the country. At the end of the day, the answer to this is, the federal government should have absolutely zero say when a medical professional feels uncomfortable performing a procedure or prescribing a treatment for someone.
Jack Davis of The Western Journal is reporting, “A 2021 Executive Order from President Joe Biden sought to equate gender identity and biology when it comes to the legalities around discrimination. That means a doctor believing boys are born boys and girls are born girls could be forced to provide gender transition drugs, treatments and surgeries on pain of facing a lawsuit alleging discrimination.”
“The American College of Pediatricians, Catholic Medical Associates, and an OB-GYN doctor whose care focus is adolescents sued to block enforcement,” the report continues.
“This case challenges whether the federal government can make medical doctors perform gender-transition surgeries, prescribe gender-transition drugs, and speak and write about patients according to gender identity, rather than biological reality—regardless of doctors’ medical judgment or conscientious objections,” the organization, which now has legal representation provided by Alliance Defending Freedom, went on to say.
“Under the government’s overreaching interpretation, doctors now face an untenable choice: either act against their medical judgment and deeply held convictions by performing controversial and often medically dangerous gender-transition interventions, or succumb to huge financial penalties, lose participation in Medicaid and other federal funding, and, as a practical matter, lose the ability to practice medicine in virtually any setting,” the complaint added.
“Doctors should never be forced to perform a controversial and medically dangerous procedure that goes against their best judgment, their conscience, or their religion, especially when it involves vulnerable children,” ADF Senior Counsel Chris Schandevel wrote in a statement, as per a piece from CBN.
“President Biden’s Health and Human Services department is grossly overreaching its authority and, in so doing, putting children’s psychological and physical health in danger. Our clients are rightfully objecting on medical, ethical, religious, and conscientious grounds to this unlawful government mandate,” Schandevel explained.
He then described the administration’s position as a “radical interpretation” of the law.
The lawsuit was tossed out back in November of 2022. U.S. District Judge Travis McDonough, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, declared the presence of the law without any sort of enforcement happening, wasn’t enough to show that anyone had been damaged by it.
“Although injunctions to block the law were issued in the Fifth and Eighth circuits, McDonough said that was of no importance,” The Western Journal reported.
“In the Sixth Circuit, ‘the mere possibility of prosecution,’ such as the plaintiff’s intended course of action falling within the plain text of a non-moribund statute, ‘does not amount to a “credible threat” of prosecution. Instead, the threat of prosecution must be certainly impending to constitute injury in fact,’” he stated.
Vice President of ADF, Lathan Watts, published an opinion in the National Review, explaining that the legal language being used is hiding the true importance of the order.
“While the legal question before the court is focused on whether the physicians and other health-care professionals have standing to seek relief from the courts, much more troubling cultural currents loom beneath the surface: the politicization of medicine and laws made by the unelected and unaccountable branches of government,” he remarked in the article.
“For the 3,000 members of the American College of Pediatricians and the Catholic Medical Association, along with innumerable physicians across the country who abide by the Hippocratic Oath to ‘first, do no harm,’ permanently altering the healthy body of a child is unthinkable,” he added.
The organization’s vice president noted that the administration need not have acted on this order for it to chill the bones of anyone who prizes liberty, saying, “the potential consequences of the Biden administration’s gender-identity mandate loom like the Sword of Damocles over the heads of those whose personal and professional ethics are at odds with the ongoing politicization of medicine.”
Due to the fact that the administration has asserted it will indeed enforce the order, though it has yet to do so, “doctors across the nation are now in the untenable position of choosing between adherence to conscience and adherence to the ideology of federal bureaucrats,” Watts commented.
“The choice is not only an impossible one for these doctors but also an unconstitutional one for any citizen of this republic. The religious liberty and free speech clauses of the First Amendment were written to protect the God-given right to live and speak according to one’s convictions and to prevent government-coerced speech or conduct,” the op-ed continued.
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