The 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals again has told a Democratic administration that it may not put the jackboots of government upon the necks of nuns.
In its Dec. 9 decision in Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra, the circuit court’s unanimous three-judge panel affirmed a permanent injunction against the Biden administration’s perceived desire to force religious healthcare organizations to provide or pay for surgery or other treatment for gender “transitions.”
APPEALS COURT RULES CATHOLIC MEDICAL CENTERS CAN’T BE FORCED TO PERFORM TRANSGENDER SURGERIES
The Religious Sisters of Mercy and other Catholic healthcare-related organizations hold well-established faith beliefs against such transitions. They argue the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is a law encoding First Amendment religious-exercise rights, provides them protection from being forced to provide service contrary to those beliefs. The Biden administration, however, pays only the barest lip service to the RFRA.
Relying on ambiguous language in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, the administration issued a “Notice and Guidance” to the effect that could require such surgeries to be performed. It also “expressly” refused to admit that specific religious-liberty language in federal law applied to Section 1557.
While sidestepping religious-liberty requirements, the administration announced it would “vigorously enforce” its leftist interpretation of Section 1557’s prohibition of “discrimination based on … sex.” According to this highly disputable interpretation, this language about “sex” also applies to the medical changing of one’s natural sex. In sum, it reads well-established and explicit guarantees of religious liberty quite narrowly while reading vaguer language against sex discrimination quite broadly. The administration’s intellectual integrity, in other words, is nonexistent.
Wisely, the judges shot down the administration’s rules and “guidance.” A long series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years have affirmed the primacy of the First Amendment and also the status of RFRA as being, like the Civil Rights Act, “a kind of super-statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws.” Unless later federal laws explicitly overturn RFRA’s religious-liberty guarantees while somehow not running afoul of the First Amendment, RFRA’s provisions always must be assumed to apply full force.
The 8th Circuit found that the administration’s position could cause “irreparable harm” to the Catholic organizations’ free exercise of religion. The 8th Circuit is correct. The government must learn that religious liberty must not be mutilated.
