President Donald Trump’s administration faces a lawsuit over a new rule allowing health care providers to deny care to women, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups whose medical needs raise an objection of religion or conscious.
Lambda Legal, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Association of LGBTQ+ Psychiatrists are among the coalition of civil rights groups who are suing Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services over its new rule. In their complaint filed Tuesday, the coalition argued the new Health and Human Services rule violates the basic freedoms of individuals who could face discrimination from religious conservatives.
“Although purporting to implement long-standing healthcare statutes with specific provisions affording protections for the religious or moral beliefs of certain individuals and entities (‘religious objections’), the rule instead creates a wholly new regime that elevates religious objections over all other interests and values,” the complaint says. “The rule invites a much larger universe of healthcare workers to decline to serve patients based on religious objections, defines with unprecedented breadth the types of activities to which they may object and fails to reconcile objections with the needs and rights of patients — even though doing so is critical in any regulatory scheme administering these laws. And the rule does not include emergency exceptions.”
View the complete May 29 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.