Supreme Court Transgender Decision Leads to Religious Liberty Legal Battle
A transgender man last week filed a lawsuit against a Catholic-run hospital in Maryland, citing in his complaint June’s landmark Supreme Court decision on transgender rights, fulfilling conservative fears that the ruling would usher in a legal war.
The suit, filed on behalf of Jesse Hammons by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleges that St. Joseph Medical Center, a Catholic-run hospital within the University of Maryland Medical System, violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by refusing to perform a surgery necessary to Hammons’s transition from woman to man. The suit uses Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County to buttress its argument, namely, that refusing services to transgender people is a form of discrimination on the basis of sex.
When Bostock was decided in June, many social conservatives predicted that it would have dire implications for women’s sports leagues, single-sex dorms on college campuses, and general religious liberty exceptions to nondiscrimination laws granted to faith-based institutions. . .
For a discrimination claim to be successful, you’d have to argue that a patient with a cancerous uterus is comparable, similarly situated to a patient with a healthy uterus. Good hospitals remove diseased organs, not healthy ones. Regardless of "identity" https://t.co/tKilMrL4Po
— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) July 21, 2020
Anderson pointed to his own work on transgender activists’ clashes with religious institutions and said that the ACLU’s argument holds no water, since “good hospitals remove diseased organs, not healthy ones. Regardless of ‘identity.’”
The ACLU’s argument rests on two points. The first is that St. Joseph’s, which, until UMMS acquired it in 2012, was owned by the Catholic Church, violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause by operating according to Catholic teaching. The second is that the hospital violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it would have performed the procedure, a hysterectomy, if Hammons, a biological woman, needed it for reasons other than gender dysphoria. (Read more from “Supreme Court Transgender Decision Leads to Religious Liberty Legal Battle” HERE)
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