A Serious Blow to Religious Freedom. Judge Rules Against Catholic Hospital Which Refused Trans Surgery
This is not good.
Some nut job is suing a Catholic hospital for refusing to remove her perfectly healthy uterus as part of her so-called “transition.” And some leftwing judge just sided with her and gave a judicial shout out to Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Yup. I’m getting a little nervous here. If Catholic hospitals are forced to take part in trans surgeries and abortion we no longer have Catholic hospitals.
A federal judge in Maryland ruled in favor of a gender-confused woman who sued a Catholic hospital for not removing her healthy uterus.
Judge Deborah Chasanow, a Bill Clinton appointee, ruled that “Jesse” Hammons could continue her lawsuit against University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center for denying her request for a hysterectomy in 2019. Hammons is “married” to Lura Groen, a pastor of the left-wing Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Judge Chasanow relied on the 2020 Supreme Court opinion Bostock v. Clayton County, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, which read into Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protections for “gender identity” and gender-confused individuals.
The medical center is run by the University of Maryland health system, but as part of the purchase of the clinic, an agreement was signed that required the facility to maintain Catholic principles in its practices. The Catholic Church opposes the removal of healthy body organs and teaches the truth that there are men and women and someone cannot change their sex.
I think the hospital should just say we now have a rule that we don’t remove healthy organs no matter what gender. So we won’t remove a healthy uterus from either a man or a woman. Ha! Problem solved.
That’s the fun middle finger response but that actually wouldn’t solve the issue of religious freedom. That will almost certainly end up at the US Supreme Court. I guess we’ll find out what Gorsuch actually meant.
Chasanow wrote:
Applying that reasoning here [of Bostock] , if a hospital has a policy against performing a surgery to treat gender dysphoria—a condition inextricably related to a person’s sex—but will perform that surgery to treat any other medical diagnosis, the hospital intentionally relies on sex in its decisionmaking.
The ruling allows for Hammons to seek damages against the Catholic hospital at a trial.