Doctors Don't Have to Perform Transgender Surgeries Says Federal Court
Our friends at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty have advised us that a federal appeals court just blocked a harmful Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that would have forced doctors and hospitals to perform gender-transition procedures on their patients against their conscience and best medical judgment.
In Franciscan Alliance v Becerra, the court ruled that a Catholic healthcare network and a group of nearly 19,000 healthcare professionals cannot be required to carry out these procedures in violation of their deeply held beliefs and professional medical judgment.
An association of over 19,000 healthcare professionals, eight states, and two religious hospitals challenged the mandate in the federal court for the Northern District of Texas. (A similar suit, involving other challengers, was filed in North Dakota). In December 2016, the Texas court issued a preliminary ruling that the policy was an unlawful overreach by a federal agency and a likely violation of religious liberty. And in October 2019, the court confirmed its earlier ruling, explaining that doctors must be free to practice in their field of medicine without being forced to perform these controversial procedures that violate their faith.
The court did not, however, issue an order permanently stopping the government from imposing this unlawful mandate on religious hospitals and doctors. Becket therefore appealed on behalf of the challengers. In April 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the district court should consider further whether to grant that lasting protection.
Back at the district court, in August 2021, the judge granted the permanent relief the doctors and hospitals sought. Under the district court’s final ruling, the government may not require the challengers to perform or insure gender-transition procedures contrary to their faith and medical judgment going forward—even if the agency tinkers around the edges with the language of its mandate.
Dissatisfied with not being able to force religious healthcare providers to violate their faith, in late 2021, the federal government, along with the ACLU, appealed the decision back to the Fifth Circuit. Oral argument took place on August 4, 2022.
In the unanimous ruling, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s order “permanently enjoining [HHS] from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs.” The court explained that while the government argued it should get more chances to show why it needed religious healthcare providers to participate in gender-transition procedures, other cases showed that permanent protection was appropriate—including, ironically, cases brought by the ACLU, who had intervened in Franciscan to support the government.
Initially, the lower court's ruling blocked HHS "from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-transition surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs."
“This ruling is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America,” said Joseph Davis, counsel at Becket.
Six years ago, the federal government issued the mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act and tried to apply it to virtually every doctor nationwide. The requirement would have forced doctors to perform these procedures on any patient, including on children, even if the procedures went against their conscience and professional medical judgment. A group of religious organizations and nine states quickly sued and received protection from federal courts in North Dakota and in Texas. Today’s ruling is another successful step in this fight to protect doctors’ conscience rights.
“For years, our clients have provided excellent medical care to all patients who need it,” said Davis. “Today’s ruling ensures that these doctors and hospitals may continue to do this critical work in accordance with their conscience and professional medical judgment.”
Joseph Davis, who works as counsel with Becket, a religious liberty group representing the physicians, said the ruling was appropriate for healthcare workers.
"This ruling," Davis says, "is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America. Doctors cannot do their jobs and comply with the Hippocratic Oath if the government requires them to perform harmful, irreversible procedures against their conscience and medical expertise."
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Democrat Slams GOP for Posting 'Child Pornography,' Then People Remind Him Where It Came From
Democrats appeared horrified in response to a Nebraska Republican Party Twitter account posting explicit cartoon-style images of what appears to be young adults (if not underage children) committing sex acts.
“We apologize for the graphic nature of this tweet. We support Republican values/candidates to protect children, their education and parental rights. The tweet showcases the hard facts of what materials and books are in Nebraska Schools, due to Democratic policies and agendas,” the Nebraska GOP wrote in the since-deleted tweet.
One Nebraska Democrat in particular, former chair of the Nebraska Democratic party Vince Powers, was especially put off by the images.
Sadly for Powers, he failed to realize these are the very same images his colleagues in the Democratic Party have been fighting to keep in school libraries for months on end now.
“[The Nebraska Republican Party] has posted child pornography on Twitter . I won’t retweet it. It’s disgusting.@RepDonBacon @Flood4Nebraska @SenatorFischer and Jim Pillen need to condemn this sick public tweet immediately or otherwise it will be fair to say each is ok with child pornography,” Powers wrote regarding the since-deleted tweet, according to Not the Bee.
As it turns out, the disgusting, explicit pictures shared by the GOP account were from a book called “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Powers’s allies in the Democratic Party have been fighting to make that book available to underage school children for months.
“Gender Queer” and other books depicting transgender individuals committing sex acts have appeared in schools in Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, according to an October 2021 report from The Western Journal.
The Western Journal’s report found one potential reason for the book’s wide dissemination: Two prominent national school library organizations have promoted the book as essential reading material for minors.
Establishment media outlets have covered the Republican outcry over the books as if it was some sort of push for Nazi-style book burning. For example, take these excerpts from a CNN piece titled “Book bans move to center stage in the red-state education wars.”
Keep in mind: Republicans are calling to remove porn and other forms of inappropriate subject matter from school libraries.
“Though battles over access to controversial titles traditionally have been fought district by district, and even school by school, Republican-controlled states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, are now pushing statewide rules that make it easier for critics to remove books they dislike from school libraries in every community,” CNN reported in April.
“Supporters of the efforts to restrict classroom teaching and/or ban books, by contrast, often cite a threat to ‘traditional’ morality as a justification. When DeSantis signed the bill easing challenges to school library collections, one of the speakers he brought to the podium was a mother who had been prominent in protests against school masking requirements in Volusia County.”
The most oft-cited book being removed by Republican critics is “Gender Queer,” and yet, in its coverage, CNN failed to mention it even once.
It’s sure nice to hear Mr. Powers acknowledge that the images from “Gender Queer” are in fact child pornography.
Perhaps its time for him to break ranks with his colleagues and demand it be removed from all of our nation’s schools immediately.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/democrat-slams-gop-posting-child-pornography-people-remind-came
*************************************************It’s Open Season on Jews in New York City
The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.
In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child.
The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him.
“This was a perfect opportunity for them to do the right thing,” Hershkop told me. “Nobody was saying this isn’t a big deal and we shouldn’t make an arrest. Everybody was on the same page here.” As he explained, “it was an assault on a 5-year-old caught on camera. I didn’t think I’d have to fight for justice.”
Perhaps the attack, which stemmed from a seemingly innocuous dispute over a parking space—a common enough occurrence in a densely populated place like Crown Heights, and one that almost never ends with anyone in the hospital—was just too fraught of an event for the police to want to handle too aggressively. Maybe someone feared that drawing additional attention to a group of young Black men attacking a prominent Orthodox Jew would threaten to inflame tensions in a neighborhood with a long but mostly improving (and generally misunderstood) history of racial division.
Maybe, but maybe not: Overload in the New York court system, increasingly lenient prosecutors and judges, and a police department in which officers are quitting at a growing clip, all make it easier for even open-and-shut cases to languish, and for people at every level of the system to find excuses not to resolve them.
The dysfunctional handling of public order takes different forms across the city, and across the country: Philadelphia is experiencing record murder rates; San Francisco experimented with decriminalizing certain forms of property crime, at least until its pro-reform district attorney lost a recent recall election. As with various other recent American traumas, the ambient disorder has its own distinct characteristics as far as Jews are concerned. In a study released this past July, the New York-based group Americans Against Antisemitism found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison.
Earlier this month, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore named Aryeh Wolf was gunned down in broad daylight as he attached solar panels to the roof of a building in a gentrifying neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. As with Hershkop’s attack, Wolf’s murder was a motiveless crime in which the motive was obvious. To the killer, Wolf and the trendy new technology he was installing might have represented the growing penetration of outsiders, further distilled by Wolf being the ultimate of outsiders: the proud religious Jew. So far, no one has been arrested. The Washington police still consider the motive in the crime to be unknown.
In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected. The city reported a 76% year-over-year rise in hate crimes during the first three months of 2022—attacks on Jews more than tripled, accounting for much of the spike. When reached for comment by email, the NYPD’s public information office stated that the Hate Crimes Task Force has made 44 arrests related to attacks on Jews so far in 2022 compared to 33 in all of 2021.
The report from Americans Against Antisemitism only dealt with incidents in which the NYPD found enough evidence of a bigoted motive to refer the case to the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. Not every potential bias-related attack on Jews reaches that threshold, though. In Hershkop’s case, the assailants used no antisemitic language and had no connection to any extremist networks. The question of whether the attackers would have responded with similar brutality to a parking dispute involving a member of any other ethnic or religious group is considered too hypothetical for the New York criminal justice system to handle. The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force was not involved in investigating the attack on him, Hershkop told me.
Israel Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism and one of the co-authors of the report, said the study aimed “to answer a simple question: Are there consequences for anti-Jewish hate crimes?” The document gives a clear answer: “In the majority of trackable cases, prosecution has been effectively nonexistent.” Some unknowable number of the 118 anti-Jewish hate crime suspects whose cases showed up in the state’s WebCrims database since 2018 were sent to state psychiatric institutions for an unknown period of time, instead of being criminally charged, Bitton explained. Fifteen took plea deals, although the study found no evidence that any of these agreements involved jail time. In 23 cases, the charges were dropped. The only conviction was for a relatively high-profile incident, in which the suspect choked and beat a visibly Jewish man in his mid-50s while he walked home from Shabbat day services in Crown Heights.
Devorah Halberstam, a veteran anti-hate crime activist based in Crown Heights, co-founded a civilian review board that advises the NYPD on how to proceed with incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. The group has been meeting each month for the past year. She stressed that any failure to punish such attacks isn’t a problem limited to Jewish victims. In a widely publicized case this past January, a 62-year-old Asian woman was attacked outside of her home in Queens. She fell into a coma and died 10 weeks later.
Halberstam said the killing was not prosecuted as a hate crime, even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community,” Halberstam said of the rarity with which hate crimes charges are pursued. “It’s the broader picture.” Halberstam blames the sparse number of guilty verdicts on the vagueness of New York’s hate crimes statute, leading prosecutors to drop hate crime charges in order to pursue lesser allegations that can be more easily proven in court. “If you make the guidelines stricter, they don’t have as much leeway to get out of it,” Halberstam said.
A backlog in the criminal courts further gridlocks the system. In early 2022, the state had over 47,000 open criminal cases, an increase of 15% compared to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Americans Against Antisemitism found that there were nine anti-Jewish hate crime prosecutions in the city that had been pending for two years or more.
The Americans Against Antisemitism analysis only refers to incidents that generated police reports and entered the criminal justice system. Some unknowable number of attacks on Jews occur beyond any official awareness. “Most hate crimes are not even reported in the first place,” says Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, and a former power broker in the New York State Assembly.
Hershkop agrees. “Eighty percent never even got to the point of making a police report,” he speculated, referring to Jewish victims of bias incidents. “That’s how we’re artificially hiding hate crimes. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report.”
Even the Jews who do report what are obviously identity-motivated crimes against them can be treated with a revealing indifference. In June, 26-year-old Yizchak Goldstein was sucker-punched on East 33rd Street near Park Avenue at around 1 p.m. Goldstein, who was visiting from Miami, was wearing a kippah, unlike his nearby cousin. The attacker didn’t run off. “He squared off to fight,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t afraid of the cops—he literally joked to me, call 911 … he was so confident.” When Goldstein did call the police, he discovered that the assailant, who had disappeared down the crowded street at a walking pace, was right not to be worried. The officers told Goldstein that they could not treat the assault as a hate crime because the attacker didn’t say anything antisemitic to him.
That wasn’t all. “They said that even if we catch this guy he’ll be out in a few hours and that this happens every single day,” Goldstein recalled. But at least the police arrived quickly, he said, “and were honest and upfront with me.” Goldstein said the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force never contacted him, and that he only heard from the department one other time, when an officer wanted to confirm the location of the attack about a month later. No suspect was ever arrested.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/open-season-jews-new-york-city-hate-crimes
**************************************************A Modern, Americanized Version of a Maoist Struggle Session
Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right?
Wrong. Not these days. The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history.
Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.”
Pretty basic stuff.
Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his perspective, then issued what looked like a forced confession for his crime.
The whole episode demonstrates how American and other Western institutions have been wholly radicalized in a short amount of time, squandering their reputations and authority.
Here’s how it went down.
The American Historical Association president argued that academic historians should focus simply on bringing to life the world of people in the past as it was and as they saw it, instead of framing every historical person or event through a modern “social justice” lens.
Sweet laid out the problem, which he said is transforming the profession of historian:
This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.
For an example of this, I’d point to the recent book “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe,” written by two history professors. The book devotes much space to debunking “whiteness” and ambles through the history of the Middle Ages making often factually dubious evaluations and value judgments of people and events from over a millennium ago.
This is becoming the norm, especially for social history, not the exception.
Here’s the part that really got Sweet into hot water. While making his argument, he offered a rather mild critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing that the reimagining of U.S. history “spoke to the political moment,” but he “never thought of it primarily as a work of history.”
That’s a rather tepid way of describing the 1619 Project.
The Times’ endeavor was full of inaccuracies and ahistorical revisionism. Its essays were shredded by historians and writers across the political spectrum, from some of my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation to the World Socialist Web Site.
Sweet also took issue with the increasing description of slavery as a problem unique to the United States. He noted how most of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in Brazil and the Caribbean, and wrote that it was historically problematic to whitewash the prominent role that African nations played in promoting the slave trade.
Sweet threw a few obligatory shots at the right, perhaps to assure the left-wing ivory tower that he was being balanced in his piece and that the real villains are on the right.
It didn’t work.
The essay didn’t go over well with the apparently all-powerful woke left. Sweet’s generous description of the 1619 Project as not really history and his inclusion of a fuller historical record was too much for activists masquerading as historians in the academe.
After a few days of nonstop frothing from academics on Twitter—and undoubtedly much more out of the public eye—Sweet added a long, groveling apology to the top of his article.
He wrote that his gentle rebuke of presentism and politicization of history caused “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the [American Historical] Association.”
It’s a hallmark of woke activists to claim that arguments they don’t like cause “harm” just before they censor them. The “words are violence” school of thought apparently is universally accepted now among our ruling class clerisy.
The ridiculous apologies went on and on. Here’s more of Sweet’s cringing prose:
I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.
The American Historical Association then locked its Twitter account. When it unlocked the account, the association issued an additional apology, blaming the incident on “alt-right trolls.”
The episode—to make a historical comparison—seemed to be a modern, Americanized version of a Maoist struggle session.
It’s not just that leftists responded hysterically to Sweet’s piece, but they apparently have so much power over the American Historical Association that, in effect, they can force the group’s president to issue cringing apologies at the snap of their fingers.
Shall we put a dunce hat on the professor and allow the mob to throw insults and rotten fruit at him, too?
It’s just the latest example of how institutions in America have been rapidly and totally captured by radical, left-wing revolutionaries. The response to the over-the-top opposition to Sweet’s piece should have been an offer to debate or publish another view at the most.
And if that didn’t work, Sweet’s ridiculous critics should have been told to get bent.
That didn’t happen and a struggle session ensued.
Imagine how different things would be if institutions and bureaucracies had just said “no,” or refused to comply with extremist demands? Because even the slightest resistance has been removed, we are left with situations where, for instance, a small tribute to Abraham Lincoln is removed at a university because a single person complained about it.
Our institutions, public agencies, corporations, and professional organizations are becoming both highly censorious of dissent from the dominant “narrative,” while also allowing woke Twitter mobs and campus activists to dictate their policies.
In one sense, Sweet was correct in his apology. His words did cause “harm.” The fact that he apologized to the mob indicates how the history profession and America’s elite organizations and institutions have been totally compromised and radicalized.
As activists and mobs tore down historical statues that they found offensive, one response from the “measured” left was that offensive history and statues should be removed from public display and placed in a museum. You know, for “context.”
But do you trust organizations such as the American Historical Association or James Madison’s Montpelier—which now aligns with the Southern Poverty Law Center—to provide faithful and accurate representations of the past?
Perhaps the way forward is to keep history in the public eye and out of the clutches of ideologically one-note institutions that are fanatically obsessed with, as Sweet wrote, “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.”
It is with the people and alternative institutions that we should place our trust.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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