And So It Begins: Lawsuit Filed Against Catholic Hospital For Refusing To Perform Hysterectomy On Transgender Individual
The lawsuit cites a recent Supreme Court decision that redefined “sex” to include “gender identity.”
A transgender man–which means a person who was born female but identifies as male–is suing a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a hysterectomy citing “gender identity” discrimination.
Jesse Hammons, 33, is seeking a hysterectomy as treatment for gender dysphoria. The hospital argues that it would be unethical to remove a healthy, female reproductive organ.
University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, a Catholic-founded hospital now in the University of Maryland Medical System, canceled the hysterectomy for 33-year-old Jesse Hammons of Baltimore, which had been scheduled for Jan. 6.
The plaintiff’s claims that the hysterectomy would not have been canceled if it were for a diagnosis other than gender dysphoria. Because the hospital performs hysterectomies for other diagnosed conditions, it treated Hammons unfairly. Hammons said the surgery would help eliminate the production of estrogen and drastically improve mental health.
Hammond’s surgeon has not been named in the lawsuit, but he or she does have admitting privileges at St. Joseph’s Medical Center. Doctors with admitting privileges at the hospital must agree to abide by the Catholic ethical directives.
Hammond has gone through months of tests and preparation for the surgery.
Hammons, whose spouse Lura Groen is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said it was a surprise that a hospital’s religious affiliation could be an obstacle to the surgery, the Washington Post report…
…“Discrimination is not a part of religious liberty,” Groen said in a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union. “As a faith leader and taxpayer, I am appalled that this act was done at a government institution and in the name of religion.”
Unsurprisingly, the ACLU has gotten involved in the case.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland July 16, claims St. Joseph’s Medical Center violated the equal protection clause under the Fourteenth Amendment and anti-discrimination provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union is involved in the case. It has been engaged in a decades-long crusade against Catholic hospitals, often objecting that they will not provide abortions, which Catholic teaching recognizes as killing the unborn child.
In recent years, it has backed efforts to force compliance with LGBT demands. As CNA has previously reported, the legal group is a beneficiary of a major patronage system seeking to classify religious freedom protections as illegally discriminatory where religion conflicts with LGBT or pro-abortion rights demands.
Source: Catholic News Agency
In June, conservatives were gobsmacked by the 6-3 ruling especially when the majority opinion was written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch. In the decision, Gorsuch essentially denied that there were differences between men and women and used the language used by transgender activists–that sex is “assigned at birth.”
In his explanation of discrimination, Gorsuch gave this example:
…take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.
At the time, Josh Hammer wrote what many conservatives were thinking in his piece in the New York Post.
In Bostock v. Clayton County, the majority informed us that the interpretation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, held unchallenged between its enactment and the year 2017, was, in fact, erroneous. The statute’s prohibition against employment discrimination on the basis of sex, Gorsuch told us, extends to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
This isn’t textualism. It’s ivory-tower liberalism. And it’s completely at odds with the Supreme Court’s longstanding dictum that Congress, in drafting statutes, won’t inscribe a hidden meaning in otherwise plain language: As Justice Samuel Alito sharply noted in dissent, “sex,” in 1964, meant biological sex — man and woman — not orientation and certainly not subjective gender identity.
Source: New York Post
As statues of Mary and Jesus are being defaced, churches are being torched, worshippers are harassed, and the Medical Experts™ have warned the dangers of worship services during a pandemic while saying that hook-ups on Tinder are just fine–we can all see that this is a blatant attack on religious freedoms by the left in the name of tolerance.
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