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Trump and the GOP Are About to Give a Rabidly Anti-LGBTQ Judge a Lifetime Appointment

New Civil Rights Movement | May 26, 2020

Topics: Affordable Care Act, Cory Wilson, judicial appointments, marriage equality, Roe v. Wade, Trump administration, US Circuit Court

Part of a sweeping effort by President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate to pack the courts with extremely conservative justices, Mississippi judge Cory Wilson has been open with his anti-LGBTQ political views.

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted a hearing of Cory Wilson, an anti-LGBTQ Mississippi judge nominated by President Donald Trump to have a lifetime appointment on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Pink News points out that in 2012, Wilson strongly opposed same-sex marriage, calling it “a pander to liberal interest groups and an attempt to cast Republicans as intolerant, uncaring, and even bigoted.”

Keep in mind that the Republican Party has repeatedly pushed ballot measures, statewide bans, and national laws to keep same-sex marriage illegal. In fact, the party’s 2016 national platform sought to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

In 2016, Wilson also supported Mississippi House Bill 1523, a hideously anti-LGBTQ bill that would prevent lawsuits against anyone who discriminates on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” opposing same-sex marriage, transgender identity, or premarital sex. In short, the bill allows businesses and medical workers of all sorts to deny service to LGBTQ people.

The bill was signed into law by Governor Phil Bryant on July 27, 2016, and though U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law in 2017, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the exact same court Wilson now wants to sit on — reversed Reeves’s decision.

Wilson also wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion access, and the Affordable Care Act (aka. Obamacare). Wilson dodged questions about his desire to turn over the ACA during his senate questioning.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Slate has a rundown of Wilson’s very vocal disdain for Obama, Hillary Clinton and the ACA:

Wilson called Barack Obama “King Barack,” “petty and small,” “a fit-throwing teenager,” the “Anointed One,” a “radical leftist,” and “shrill, dishonest, and intellectually bankrupt.” He charged Obama with running the “most paranoid and politicized White House since Nixon.” He has also called Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary,” “criminal and clueless,” and either “felony dumb or willfully ignorant.” And he falsely accused her of destroying documents under subpoena.

Then there’s Wilson’s loathing for the ACA. He has called the law “illegitimate,” “perverse,” “big intrusive government” that “is less about healthcare than it is about redistribution of wealth and power.”

He has also stood up for his state’s voter ID laws and mass purges of voter rolls, repeatedly (and falsely) claiming that voter fraud is a serious problem in Mississippi, Slate writes. In short, he’s just the sort of ideologue that Trump would love to install in the increasingly right-wing 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thanks to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Wilson is likely to get confirmation.

Written by Daniel Villarreal, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

Civil Rights Office at HHS Moves Closer to Killing Protections for LGBTQ Patients

New Civil Rights Movement | April 29, 2020

Topics: Affordable Care Act, Department of Justice, Heritage Foundation, Obamacare, religious freedom, Roger Severino, US Department of Health and Human Services

Run by Christian right activist Roger Severino, the Health And Human Services office has been pushing in this direction for a while now.

Roger Severino, a Christian right activist who heads the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’s Office for Civil Rights, is one step closer to his own personal goal of removing protections for LGBTQ patients, a move that would allow discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.

Under Severino’s leadership, the Trump administration has been moving quickly toward the final stages of dismantling critical protections for LGBTQ patients, Politico reports. The Dept. of Health and Human Services has sent a draft of its rewrite of an Obama-era policy to the Dept. of Justice for review, a sign it could soon announce the rollback of hard-fought regulations protecting some of the nation’s most vulnerable people.

HHS has been working on re-interpreting and re-writing the nondiscrimination provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The agency’s website currently says Section 1557 of the ACA “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs or activities.”

“Advocates fear that it would allow hospitals and health workers to more easily discriminate against patients based on their gender or sexual orientation,” Politico reports, noting the provision “also offered specific protections for transgender patients for the first time and extended protections for women who had abortions.”

Severino has been called a “radical” anti-LGBTQ religious right activist. He previously served as CEO and counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious right non-profit that opposes separation of church and state. He also once served as the Director of the DeVos family’s Center for Religion and Civil Society in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity.

Late last year a federal judge voided a rule Severino had implemented allowing medical providers to cite their personal religious or moral beliefs as a reason to refuse to provide care to certain individuals or to perform certain procedures. It would have allowed doctors and other health care professionals to refuse to perform or participate in abortions, prescribe or deliver contraception, or provide care to and LGBTQ person.

Severino is also tied to the Trump administration’s efforts to ban same-sex couples and LGBTQ people from adoption services.

Severino has long sought to gut ObamaCare’s LGBTQ protections. Before coming to the Trump administration Severino co-authored a Heritage Foundation report claiming new proposed ObamaCare nondiscrimination provisions “threaten the religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and independent medical judgment of health care professionals.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

The General Assembly Was Not Impressed With Religious Arguments Against Trans Health Care Bill

Marilyn Drew Necci | March 6, 2020

Topics: Affordable Care Act, Afton Bradley, danica roem, Dick Saslaw, Family Foundation of Virginia, General Assembly 2020, HB 1429, Lionel Spruill, transgender health care, Virginia Catholic Conference, Virginia League For Planned Parenthood

Del. Danica Roem’s bill to ensure transgender Virginians receive equal treatment by their health insurance plans raised some objections from conservatives, but nonetheless passed both houses of the General Assembly.

Anytime the LGBTQ community gets too close to obtaining equal rights, there’s always someone out there to tell us that we’re “going too far.” Sadly, the current General Assembly session is no exception.

Currently at issue is HB 1429, a bill introduced by 13th District Delegate Danica Roem, who by now I shouldn’t have to tell you is the first openly transgender state-level elected official in the entire country. She introduced this bill to allow transgender Virginians equality in health care by preventing health insurance companies from denying or adding extra costs to specific procedures or overall health plans obtained by trans people in Virginia. In other words, your health insurance company can’t upcharge you because you’re trans, or add extra costs to your hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, or any other trans-related medical costs.

This is pretty straightforward — at bare minimum, LGBTQ Virginians should be able to expect that their health insurance companies will treat them the same as they treat any other Virginian, and bill them accordingly. While the legal arguments around whether the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition of discrimination against any individual on basis of sex applies to trans people are still ongoing, the final regulations released by the US Department of Health And Human Services at the time of the ACA’s passage specified that the rule would be enforced on the basis of gender identity.

So at the federal level, something like this is at least arguably already in force. However, Roem’s bill would simply ensure that, regardless of any Supreme Court rulings in the coming months, that protection is specifically laid out by law in Virginia. And the bill enjoys the support of the Virginia Association of Health Plans, so it’s not seen as a drastic action by Virginia’s health insurance providers.

It hasn’t been seen that way by our elected officials in the General Assembly, either — or at least, not the Democrats. The bill passed in the House of Delegates by a party-line vote of 54-41, made it out of Senate committee on Monday by a 12-2 vote, and passed the full Senate on Thursday by a 22-18 vote. It’s now headed to Governor Northam’s desk.

But before that last vote took place, and true to form, religious conservatives were on hand to raise objections. In testimony against the bill on Monday, Family Foundation of Virginia legislative counsel Josh Hetzler said, “We’re creating a new category of personhood,” while Family Foundation president Victoria Cobb claimed in an email to the Virginia Mercury that the bill’s acceptance of self-identified gender identities took the state outside the bounds of science.

“How can anyone know how to provide medical direction to someone who claims they are an unknown combination of male and female?” she wrote in the email to the Mercury. “Why should the insurance company bear the liability to cover unexplored areas of medicine?”

Del. Roem with representatives from Virginia League For Planned Parenthood at the Senate committee hearing Monday. (Photo via PPA Virginia/Twitter)

Fortunately for us, these arguments did not carry much weight in the Virginia Senate this week. In response to Virginia Catholic Conference founding director Jeff Caruso’s contention that the ruling in the 2014 case that allowed Hobby Lobby an exemption to ACA regulations requiring employers cover contraception should also allow for religious exemptions to this ruling, Senate Commerce and Labor Committee Chairman Dick Saslaw told Caruso that ruling had specifically been tailored to only apply to contraceptives.

Meanwhile, according to the Virginia Mercury, fellow committee member Senator Lionel Spruill rolled his eyes and implied that representatives of the Catholic Church lacked the moral authority to make such an argument. “One church should be the last to say that kind of stuff, given what’s going on,” Spruill said.

Roem herself, also present at the committee hearing, was just as quick to let those with objections know exactly where she stood, saying according to the Virginia Mercury that she refused to “explicitly deny care” for trans patients under Virginia laws. Additionally, she pointed out, the ACA policies in place are often not sufficient to ensure that trans people are receiving adequate care. “Even post-2017, transgender people are given misinformation about what these policies actually are,” she said.

Afton Bradley, care coordination manager for Virginia League of Planned Parenthood’s transgender health care program, confirmed that current ACA protections are insufficient to protect trans patients from denials of coverage, telling the Virginia Mercury that around a third of Planned Parenthood’s trans patients are denied coverage by insurance plans, sometimes based on clerical errors that insurers are often unwilling to correct even after several weeks of negotiations.

“Unfortunately, that leads to a lot of our patients paying out of pocket or going without medication,” Bradley told the Virginia Mercury. “And we know that when patients don’t have access to transition care, there are serious consequences to their health.”

Roem summed up the argument in favor of the bill very succintly on Twitter. “LGBTQ health care is health care. It is not optional,” she wrote. “Cover it. Insure it. And have a nice day.”

Top Photo via Danica Roem/Facebook

Federal Judge Overturns ObamaCare’s Transgender Protections, Because Jesus

New Civil Rights Movement | October 18, 2019

Topics: Affordable Care Act, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, anti-trans discrimination, Reed O'Connor, religious freedom, transgender health care, US District Court

The same judge who ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional has now ruled that religious freedom is more important than transgender people receiving medically necessary health care.

A U.S. District Court judge in Texas has overturned the protections written into ObamaCare for transgender people, ruling they violate the religious rights of healthcare providers who hold religious beliefs that oppose the existence of transgender people.

On Tuesday Judge Reed O’Connor, appointed by President George W. Bush, “vacated an Obama-era regulation that prohibited providers and insurers who receive federal money from denying treatment or coverage to anyone based on sex, gender identity, or termination of pregnancy,” The Hill reports.

That regulation also mandated healthcare providers perform medically necessary services for transgender patients.

O’Connor is known as the same federal judge who ruled the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional last year. According to The Hill, his ruling in this case is likely to be appealed.

The Trump administration is supporting a large group of Republican state attorneys general working to strip protections from people with pre-existing conditions, and ultimately, have ObamaCare voided by the courts.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

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