Biden Admin Waives Supreme Court Review in Key Transgender Fight
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Source: Real Clear Policy
For the last six years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has pushed a controversial “transgender mandate,” which threatens religious doctors and hospitals with multimillion dollar penalties unless they perform gender transitions in violation of their conscience and medical judgment. When those doctors fought back—winning a major victory in federal appeals court in August—the fight appeared poised to head to the Supreme Court. But on Friday, the Biden administration gave up on seeking Supreme Court review—meaning the hard-fought victory for religious liberty now stands as a powerful precedent nationwide.
The case, called Franciscan Alliance v. Becerra, was brought by a Catholic hospital system and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, a nationwide organization of thousands of Christian healthcare professionals. The plaintiffs—motivated by their religious mission—compassionately treat every patient that walks through their doors, for everything from cancer to the common cold. But like many other healthcare professionals and experts, they view medical interventions designed to “change” a person’s gender to be harmful—contrary both to the best medical data about how to treat individuals struggling with gender dysphoria and to their religious understanding of sexuality and the human person. They therefore decline to perform such procedures, or to cover them in their insurance plans.
In 2016, however, the federal government attempted to make them. That year, in the waning days of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule interpreting the Affordable Care Act’s ban on “sex” discrimination in healthcare to mean that healthcare professionals must perform and insure gender transitions, or else face crippling penalties. Over the intervening years and administrations, the mandate has been tweaked around the edges. But the basic requirement—perform gender transitions or else get out of medicine—has remained the same, with the Biden Administration most recently declaring it “dangerous” and likely unlawful to “[a]ttempt[]” to restrict” gender-transition procedures, even for “minors.”
Fortunately, religious-freedom law protects the ability of religious doctors and hospitals to take a different path. In 2021, a federal court in Texas struck down the transgender mandate as unlawful and permanently blocked the federal government from forcing the plaintiffs to perform or insure gender transitions. The Biden Administration—joined by the ACLU—appealed, but a unanimous Fifth Circuit affirmed—becoming the first federal appellate court to block the transgender mandate. And on Friday, the Biden Administration let its deadline for appealing to the Supreme Court expire—meaning healthcare professionals nationwide can now get back to their ministries without fear that the mandate will be applied to them.
Read more: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/12/02/biden_admin_waves_supreme_court_review_in_key_transgender_fight_868028.html
This article is from a conservative perspective in that they are supportive of the underlying holding but my real comment/question is why is the administration not fighting this to the end? Are they afraid of a more sweeping decision? Is this going to be a pattern where we don't even take things to the USSC because we are afraid of what will happen there?
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