Trump’s New Health Division Embodies Institutional Oppression, Not “Religious Freedom”

Sen. James Lankford speaks at a news conference announcing a new division on Conscience and Religious Freedom as Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino, center, and Acting Secretary Kevin Hargan, at right, at the Department of Health and Human Services January 18, 2018, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)Sen. James Lankford speaks at a news conference announcing a new division on Conscience and Religious Freedom as Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino (center) and Acting Secretary Kevin Hargan (right) lat the Department of Health and Human Services look on, January 18, 2018, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)

The Trump administration today announced the creation of what it is calling a “new conscience and religious freedom division” within the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The purpose of this new division is to protect health care workers who object to the treatment of transgender individuals and to the provision of abortion and other reproductive health care, among other things.

Speaker after speaker invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the expansion of the so-called conscience and religious freedom division.

At a mid-morning press conference, led by HHS OCR Director Roger Severino and a host of other anti-LGBTQ lawmakers and leaders, speaker after speaker invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the expansion of the so-called conscience and religious freedom division. HHS leaders compared health care workers forced to treat transgender patients or provide reproductive health care against their moral and religious objections to civil rights leaders who spoke out against anti-Black discrimination and violence. They praised the new division as a critical step in the protection of religious freedom.

There is no question that the freedom of religion is a central tenet of US law protected both in the First Amendment to the US Constitution and in federal statutory law. But religious liberty does not permit a health care worker to refuse to treat a transgender patient because that worker does not believe that transgender people should exist. Religious liberty does not permit a doctor to deny life-saving care because the care could result in the…

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